Making of An Outdoor Geek

I think my first outdoor adventure experience occurred when I was 8 but could have been 10 when I still lived in Japan. A couple of buddies of mine and I decided that we were going to take a 4 day bicycle trip to this big lake in the western end of Tokyo, which was about about 50 miles from the area we lived. I still have few photos somewhere in one of my shoe boxes but I can't find them right now..

You're probably thinking "How in the hell did you get your parents to let you do that??" And I agree you shouldn't let your children wander off like that for four days here in the States because you'd probably get arrested for child endangerment or something like that. But that was in Japan back in the early '70s when there was no such concept yet existed. But even then, it was rather surprising to hear my mother nonchalantly said "You be careful.." as I headed out to our meeting spot.

I remember, when we put together all the money we had among the three of us, we counted barely about $40, if that. Those were the days my allowance was something like 70 cents a week. (Now, that's pretty stingy!) That was all we had. We had no idea how much anything would cost so we started figuring out.

We were pretty confident that we should be able to procure all the food we would need by rummaging through our respective mother's kitchens so we knew we wouldn't starve if we just stayed smart about rationing. Total cost = $0 so far. What else would we need aside from places to stay? Not much, really..

I had read a comic series before featuring a kid traveled all over Japan on a touring bike and I remembered that there was a scene in which the main character looked up a guide book of some sort that had a list of all the hostels in Japan. Next day, I went to a local bookstore to look for one and, to my amazement, there it was!! Problem solved!!! (not...) Of course I couldn't afford to buy it so I spent few hours standing in the isle copying down all the information we would potentially need. Everything looked good except one small detail.. The prices. The cheapest place wanted about $10/person/night. This was a problem. How were we to get our accommodations? We could certainly afford to stay at a hostel for one night but what about two other nights?

So we went back to our bible - the comic book. That kid in that story did this all the time after all. There was absolutely no reason why we couldn't do what he did - camping in the woods.. Why didn't we think of this before?? It'd be free!! It's so obvious!! Man, we're so dumb..

To be continued...