Harry Potter Cafe Lily and Amy and big Harry Potter fans. So naturally the Harry Potter cafe was on the must visit list. Lily and I arrived by subway; Amy and Diana took a taxi. (Robert didn’t join us for this outing.) The subway station next to the Harry Potter cafe, Akasaka, goes all out […]

Right off the bat, we knocked out something that was on Diana’s must-do list: a visit to one of Japan’s many Pokémon centers. The Pokémon Center Tokyo DX The one that we visited was Pokémon Center Tokyo DX. It’s located in one of Tokyo’s more ritzy malls, but it has its own dedicated entrance with […]

Or, how to get very little sleep for two days. Lily and I arrived at the Detroit Metro Airport at 3:30am on Thursday morning, meeting up with our fellow travel companions: Lily’s friends Amy, Robert, and Diana. The objective? Two weeks of fun in Japan! I have traveled many times to Asia, but it was […]

If you didn’t know what was going on, judging by the posts on Facebook, you’d think someone had died. Long form eulogies for a patch of concrete and of good times past, photos from the wayback machine, people swapping memories, and so on. The news came out not too recently that Oscoda was no longer […]

There’s a common refrain: “A bad day of fishing beats a good day at the office.” This phrase can be applied to many different pleasurable activities; for example, one can say: “A bad day of racing beats a good day at the office.” And so there I was, sitting in grid with my (no longer […]

I learned this week that Barry Rowe has passed away. I’m sure the fact that he’s gone will hit me like a ton of bricks in a little while; my mind is still in denial about the whole thing and cannot yet accept it. Goodbyes are never easy. A goodbye whose chance to be has […]

What to do about the 2022 Oscoda Pro Solo? The National Office has emailed me asking if Detroit Region was up for putting on the Oscoda Pro Solo for 2022. Things will be different this year, I’m told. Their proposed date for the Oscoda Pro Solo is no longer a back-to-back weekend with the Toledo […]

I had a 2003 Honda Civic coupe, and it was a reliable but boring daily driver. I replaced it with a 2016 Ford Fiesta ST, which is a lot of fun, but has required the most work I’ve ever had to do for a daily driver. I’ll cut to the chase: outside of maybe the […]