Travel Diary

Long before my blog, and several years before Youtube and my first smartphone, I got a novel idea (at least I thought it was!) when I was in Tokyo in 2000 starting my Asia travels:  I was going to buy a micro-cassette recorder and record some daily thoughts while traveling.  Japan was the first country, and I was going other places.  So I was just thinking, why not give some real-time thoughts about what I was seeing and doing?!?  It would be a diary of sorts.  There were times I would record when I was in coffee shops, on park benches, while on boats going to islands and on bus trips.  Many times, I would wait till I returned to my room at the end of a day, and then recap the day's events.  I wasn't always disciplined, and so there times I was trying to recall what I had done the day before, or even the day before that.  But for the most, I kept with it, and made it a habit.  In all, I filled up about 16 tapes, and numbered them in chronological order.  I ended up tossing two or three because I was revealing too much about my escapades (I thought!) and wondered it could be embarrass some people.  And there were times, too, when I was kind of being silly, and just didn't think it made sense to hold on to that material.  Crazy-sounding I know.  I kept most, though, and I have been working to convert them to audio files and Word documents.  Ultimately, I may add some of the more interesting content to my travel blog.  One gem I discovered - and you can imagine dragging all this back out almost twenty years after the fact - was meeting my wife for the very first time.  I was smitten!!

I bought that first micro-cassette recorder in Tokyo with the help of Cumo, a young lady I met on the Tokyo subway.  She enjoyed showing me around the city, and we spent a few days together.  One night she took me to an area known for electronics - either in Shibuya or Shinjiku - and that's where my novel idea turned into action.