Hiking, and then some

On Friday night, I biked out to Ota and met up with Sean and Emily for dinner, not knowing the next day would last for over 18 hours and leave me sore until now.

It all started bright and early at 5:50am. Well, let me back track. I was supposed to wake up at 5am, but I "accidentally" turned off my alarm w/o realizing it (b/c really, who wakes up at 5am on a Saturday, anyway?!). So yeah, I woke up at 5:50am when the train I was supposed to catch left at 6:14am sharp. Imagine how frantic I was in those few minutes, trying to pack everything up in order to hike a mountain! Fortunately, I made the train. Us Ota and TattyB JETs caught the same train that arrived in Maebashi at 7am. We met up with the other peeps who were driving and we all shuffled into 3 cars and headed to Hakone for our hike up Mt. Myojin-ga-take. The car ride lasted for 3 hours so I'm glad I had good company in the car. =)

After a game of Splash! Uno when everyone arrived at Shinmatsuda Station, we all took a couple of short bus rides that led us to the base of the mountain. This whole hike was set up by Daniel (thanks for planning everything, Daniel!) and is part of the "Reach the Peak" series of hikes he has planned for Gunma JETs. The first hike they did last summer was up Mt. Fuji!! Clazy!! That's 14 hours of climbing, yo! Luckily, Myojin-ga-take is more of a beginner-level hike. However, I am soo outta shape these days that it was still a bit challenging (in a good way!) up the mountain. It totally didn't occur to me that we were "hiking up a mountain" until we started climbing up and up and my calves started to tighten up. It was just the kinda push I needed...since I have been sitting on my butt the entire winter. Once we reached the top, we had lunch up there and were lucky we didn't get blown off the mountain by the strong winds. After a few pictures, we began our descent down the mountain. Everything went well and amazingly there were no injuries or mishaps from the hike....I say this only b/c of the amusing stories from their other hikes (one of which I didn't go to b/c we drove in the wrong direction and ended up north, instead of south.) That's another story tho.

In all, the hike took 5 hours. It was a great hike with a great view...we were able to see the ocean as we climbed up which was really cool. I'm really glad I did it b/c like I said, my body has been inactive for way too long. After the hike, we were all gross and nasty and ready to head home. Those of us from Ota and TattyB decided to take the train all the way home b/c we wanted to make sure we would arrive back in time and a car ride back to Maebashi Station couldn't guarantee that. Thus, we trained from Hakone ALL the way back to our place. Well, that was the plan anyway.

We left Hakone around 6pm and caught the train with everyone. Then the 5 of us from Ota and TattyB continued on our train journey as the others headed back for their cars. Even though we left around 6pm, our keitais told us that we'd still be catching our last trains home, which was fine. We made our transfers and everything seemed fine as we headed for Kuki, a station that would lead us back to our local Tobu line. We were chattin' away and even played charades on the train as all the Japanese ppl pretended not to look but were totally staring. All was well until the train suddenly stopped and EVERYONE got off. We were like...wtf?? We asked the train conductor guy if this train was heading to Kuki and he didn't even know where Kuki was!! Bad sign. Somewhere along the line, we took the wrong train. It was at that time that Jeff, Sean and I separated from the TattyB ppl as they were still able to take another train back home. The 3 of us, however, were a bit panicked as it had already been a long day and none of us wanted to spend the night in Tokyo. Luckily, Jeff found a last train that would get us back to Ota Station (which isn't the station any of us live by but at least it got us back to our city). Then began the MOST STRESSFUL TRAIN RIDE OF OUR LIVES.

To be continued...