baseball game breakdown

The girls humor their dad sometimes.  They were all super good sports and acted like they wanted to go down to Sendai with me for a baseball game.  It is about 4 hours away.  The Japanese baseball experience is quite a bit different than in America.  Every batter that comes up has his own chant that the crowd does.  And at the 7th inning stretch they sing some song and release balloons that have whistles on the end. 

Here is how our family looked when we last went to a game.  It was 2010 and about a month after we arrived in Japan.  Marie had just turned 2 about a month earlier.

I would like to thank myself for keeping our pictures in pretty little files so I could find this.  Hours of tedious labor finally paid off.

We didn’t get a good family picture this time, but here are a couple we did get.

They were great sports and seemed to have a great time.  Hope they aren’t disappointed when we go to an American game and things aren’t quite so lively.  They’ll be forced to watch the game…and then they’ll realize they hate it.  Although Mina did tell me her favorite part was seeing people run the bases.  I was quite proud of her. 

The next day we spent some time at Matsushima Bay.  this is a cool coastal area with a bunch of islands scattered around.  It has a long red bridge that you walk across to one of the islands.  We didn’t get a picture of it because we raced across.  Marie and Rachel BARELY beat Mina and me.  We pretty much just came away with this one photo that we are all proud of.

So…what did my great family get for being so patient and awesome to me the entire weekend?  As we were about an hour and half into our 4 hour drive home the minivan’s engine started sounding weird…then the acceleration stopped working.  We saw an exit and quickly decided we better take it and evaluate the situation.  As we were on the off ramp the car shut down.  We were fortunate enough to coast into a little parking area in the middle of the interchange – between the off and on ramps.  We feel really blessed in the area we were at when this happened.  With how quickly the whole breakdown happened it is very lucky we didn’t find ourselves stuck on the side of the highway. 

We have a little insurance card for roadside service and we gave it a call.  Although it is an international number their English skills, while way better than my Japanese skills, were very limited.  Their skills were limited to repeatedly asking me for my name and license plate number.  It took a long time for them to find somebody who they could get on the line to speak English with us.  The tow truck came and we gathered up everything we could carry and took a cab to the train station.  As difficult as it was to be in Japan with the language problems, it sure was nice to just be able to go to a near by train station and get home. 

Our van is dead – they called and told us the engine needs to be replaced.  Seeing as we have a month here and would have been lucky to get $1,800 out of the van, it was an easy decision to just have it junked.  It also feels good to not have to worry about selling it.

Here is what my poor family looked like at the train station.  You can see we have a pile of bags.  We realized we might not be coming back for the van so we carried everything we wanted to save. 

Did they deserve this after being so awesome to me all weekend?  Yes.  I mean, no.