Skip to main content

The New Traffic Park

The boys and I set off at 8:35 this morning for the "new" traffic park. New to us anyway. 

It seems like it's been longer, but it's just been four months since we went on our Loople adventure that would change the course of the year - nay, the course of our lives.

Back in April the boys and I took the subway downtown to ride the tourist Loople bus that goes around to all the main sites that folks like to see in Sendai. I can't wait to take friends and family on it when they visit. The all day pass that includes the subway fare to anywhere in town is such a great deal.

The thing is, most of the stuff on the Loople route is really cool, but my partners for the day were 3 and 5 years old. Shinto shrines and mausoleums are not gonna do it for them. I learned my lesson after taking them to the dinosaur exhibit at the natural history museum a while back; you gotta pace yourself. 

So we're on the Loople, which is a cheesy cable car shaped bus but pretty cool because it has a standing only area in the back with brass handrails and wood finishing for gazing out and taking it all in, and every stop is displayed on a video monitor at the front - one after another, sights that little boys have zero interest in. Even the cable car shaped bus gimmick wears off after 20 or so minutes. 

I had kinda given up and resigned myself to saying at least we did the Loople, long as it is at 70 minutes, and we saw downtown and we'd have an awesome lunch and go home happy. Kenzo was paying great attention in spite of my abandonment. 

He saw this picture of an upcoming stop pop up on the screen and pointed it out to me. It seemed to be an old fashioned, historic hydroelectric power plant combined with some sort of weird sounding park. 

Well, I was just as eager to get off the bus as the boys were, so I decided we'd at least check it out. It turned out to be, indeed, a historic hydroelectric power plant nestled in the woods in an old part of central Sendai, and next to it is a park for kids where they can ride bicycles and go-karts around a big course shaped like city streets, complete with traffic lights and railway crossings.

And that has been our main go-to spot for the last four months. 

A few weeks ago we were there and I was chatting up this other dad and he said there was another traffic park in Wakabayashi Ward and it was bigger. He stopped short of saying it was better. I know why now. They both have their charms.

We set off at 8:35 this morning on a journey that has been months in the making and wrote another chapter in the grand adventure.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

lookin tired/feelin good

I can't even read the clock right. Eri: "You're going to soccer, right? Aren't you a bit early?" Me: "Yeah! We usually leave at this time and get there right on time. We gotta go! Let's go guys!" Soccer club starts at 10 a.m. The boys know that when the long hand on the clock gets to the 8 (9:40) it's time to go to the bathroom and get our socks and shoes on and head down to the car. The big hand was on 8. The problem that Eri saw was the short hand. It was 8:40, not 9:40. I'm going nuts. Slowly . Rapidly. An hour later, after I slowly enjoyed my coffee and disposed of the last beetle (yes, all four beetles have now gone back to the earth) and cleaned his bug box to make room for new bug acquisitions and the boys chilled out on the sofa watching TV, we set off. While the boys played soccer I headed across the parking lot to grab them some juice boxes for a job well done. This is not standard procedure, but Kenzo made his comeback today after ...
1 comment
Read more

Experiences I Will Never Know About

Eri and I were checking out one of Kenzo's school notebooks tonight. This page has so much going on, and I love all of it. It made me realize something that I can easily forget - he's a person. He has a life separate from mine, lives each day having experiences that I will never know about, and has thoughts and ideas that I can't nor should get in the way of. "Thank you for doing everything," she said. Eri walked with me this morning as I went around the neighborhood and delivered planter box maintenance information and schedules to various folks.  We stopped at the first house and I rang the doorbell and handed the old lady the three-page information sheet I had made and copied and we exchanged greetings and then I realized this is going to take forever if I ring every single person’s doorbell and chit-chat with them. I’ve got 20+ more of these to hand out.  So we started just sticking them in people's mailboxes and made better time. Most folks aren’t home an...
Post a Comment
Read more

Certain Luxuries

I work from home. My office is in Osamu's future bedroom, though he doesn't know it yet. At some point a few years down the line he will probably start to yearn for his own space. For the time being he and Kenzo share the room next door and sleep in a bunk bed and have a grand time playing, roughhousing, and quarreling. As brothers are prone to do. I started the day with a two-hour meeting with an esteemed co-worker who is based in a city far away. He manages a team associated with mine, and I value our developing relationship. We're both in management positions where people depend on us, and for my part as a relatively new manager I respect and try as often as possible to seek out his advice and perspectives.  We're very different, though. We dance around the topic, but it's pretty clear that one of our differences is that I embrace ambiguity and he does not. I think that it's okay if meetings don't end with a clear solution, as long as the relationship be...
Post a Comment
Read more