The Drive Home

After a night of little sleep (the girls where up all night playing sardines, painting toe nails etc). After breakfast the children where presented with their awards and then we started the long drive back to Misawa. It was a beautiful day and we where making good time, we had stopped fro lunch about 20 minutes outside of Tokyo and where heading into out second stop when we saw the van Ben was driving pulled over at the side of the road. As we slowed down to pull over we noticed that the wheel on the rear drivers side had fallen off. Talk about scary. Ben said that the van had started to shake so they pulled over to check it out and saw no problem and so continued to drive about 15 yards further along they felt the van's back drop so pulled back onto the hard shoulder. Soon a police car pulled over and made sure everything was alright. We where able to get to the next rest area where the van was left to be picked up a few days later. Fortunately we were able to get all the children into the 2 vans we still had and get back to Misawa before midnight. I am so glad that this is my last youth trip in Japan, our time hear has been a real blast but I am ready to just supervise my own children for a while.