Venturing Off Base

Now that we've got our ID's we can go on and off base with ease. We decided to spend our Saturday

exploring what's outside of the gate nearest to us. We're on a mission to find a car this week so our first stop was a car dealership just outside of the gate. We spent about a half hour walking through and looking at the various models of cars available to us. There are quite a few that we don't have in the states. Most of the cars are older in these car lots but they have fairly low mileage. Our goal is to get as new a car as possible within our budget with the lowest mileage. We also want to see a full two years of JCI on it. JCI stands for Japanese Compulsory Insurance and is a government regulated, mandatory safety inspection that must be done every two years for cars and motorcycles in Japan. It costs approximately $500 to renew it. Usually the car dealerships offer a full 2 years of JCI but if you buy from an individual you will find many with a year or less of JCI on them. We found several during our walk through that we liked. It gave us a good idea of the types of cars available and we determined what we do and don't like in the various models.

After perusing the car dealership we walked into town to find a place to have lunch. We were looking for a soba shop but instead settled on a Curried Rice and Taco-rice restaurant. We weren't sure what taco-rice was so we ordered both curry and taco rice and shared them. We spotted a few other small restaurants we might try another time. The main road outside the gate seemed to cater to the young military guys with bars and tattoo parlors but as we walked further into town we saw many more stores and restaurants. We explored a few of the side roads to see what types of stores are nearby. On our way back to the base we noticed more car dealerships down another side road so we spent a few more hours checking out several of them. We found a car that we both liked...a Nissan Note....2006 with only abour 40,000 miles on it and two years of JCI. If we don't see something we like better by the early part of next week we will probably start the process of purchasing this car.  They say the process takes several days so hopefully by the end of next week we'll have a car so we can explore even further from the base and see a little bit of the ocean. We put in a lot of miles today and our first venture outside the gate was quite fun. I spotted several stores I'd like to come back and visit on my own next week.