Savannah to Nyack part 2

The storm, if you were anywhere in its path you know what I am talking about and if you weren't, um, there was some rain. Anyhow, our course led us to two cities and should have led us around them, but compounding our discomfort with driving our ungainly "gentle-ride van" with the wonderful super weather conditions, and what you get is the Sarah driving through downtown Baltimore and downtown D.C. in the pouring rain with very limited visablity (although the height of our truck seemed to remedy her inabilty to see stoplights) while i desperately try to read signs and maps and get us back to the main road.

After that the rest of the trip was a breeze, and we arrived in Nyack safely and with much more stuff than my parents had bargined for. for those of you who don't know Nyack is a small village in the suburbs of NYC about an hour away by car, it used to be the trading post from the city to the wild unknown but those days are long gone.

So while we were in the New York area we figured that we would investigate the New York Aikikai, and so we hopped on a bus and a subway until we were there. Low and behold it was Aikido, not all that different from what you see on tapes or what we did in Savannah, but different enough, just personal differences mainly but decidedly less martial of an art than the ACoS and I think we will be hard pressed to find any that compare. But we did get to take two classes under Donovan Waite Sensei and had a short talk with him before they started. The mats were nice and hard but maybe a little slippery, although different training surfaces should be helpful, I suppose.

Anyhow I just wanted to finish this up since WE ARE IN JAPAN NOW, and it seems silly to have this much backlog of posts.

-philip