Where in the world is Joe?

I know, I know. I complain about people not realy reading this, then I disappear for 3 weeks. I'm sorry. I've been busy (I know, old excuse) working on getting things set up for my family/Katherine to come here. In addition to that, I've felt like crap this week. Sort of similar to coming down with the flu, with a little sore throat tossed in for fun. I'll post a few times this weekend, to catch up on my insanity.

In response to a post a few weeks ago, I mentioned that we wouldn't be seeing Mt. Fuji for a while. People got confused and thought I was moving or going on a long trip. In reality, I'm doing nothing exciting. It's becoming rainy season here. It's partly cloudy 90% of the time, and mostly cloudy 50% of that. Rarely we'll have a clear day, maybe once every other week. This being the case, Fuji will be covered by clouds from now until August. And that's the rest of the story.

Some people may also be confused about my short post about Fuji Safari Park (FSP) back in May. Well here is the explaination. FSP is almost like a zoo, except its a little more open so the animals can run around. You can take a bus and go on a "safari" through the zoo feeding and petting the animals along the way. More importantly, you get to hold baby cats. Tigers, lions, etc. This makes for adorable pictures. Unfortunately, FSP was ending holding baby cats for the season, as they were getting too large and becoming potentially dangerous. Last day was May 31st if I remember correctly. Because of all that, we decided to go the last week of May to try and get in on the baby holding action. We grabbed info off their website which said they had buses running ever 50 minutes from Mishima and from Gotemba. Yeah, nothing in Fuji, go figure.

We got to Mishima at 945, the bus left at 930. No problem right? We'll just take the next one in 50 minutes. No luck, the only other bus came at 1230. I wasn't going to wait 3 hours for the next bus. We decide to ride the train to Gotemba, which is about 30 minutes from Mishima. We missed the first train from Numazu, so we had to wait 15 minutes for the second one. When we got to Gotemba, guess what? Bus left 4 minutes before we got there. The next bus was coming at 230. Did I mention that they stop letting you hold the babies at 1230? I was immedietly angry that they website said they run buses all the time when they only run them twice at each station. Obviously we missed our opportunity to go. We decided to go to outlet mall again and wander around. Andrea bought some clothes. I stayed angry.

Oh well, maybe another time.