The Black Castle

 

Installing small sized screw with silicone, to prevent water seeping into the sidecar.

First modern trike I've seen over here; 6-cylinder Honda Gold Wing with loads of extra chrome panels, windshield wiper and LED lights along the running boards. Sweet excess....

The cat shrine.

We get going late, spend a few hours at The Matsumoto Castle in the company of an excellent volunteer guide named Keiko. Axel - ever the gentleman - asks her about her age, which turns out to be 71, about 15 years older than we both would have guessed. I think she had a fun time too, chatting aaway with us. As for the castle itself, methinks it was more interesting from the outside, but of course the history behind it and the Edo period in which it played a significant role was worth learning about: 260 years of peace, which isn't something my part of the world can brag about.

Axel refuses to even look at the Nimbus' electrics, his hatred of 6 volt systems running unusually deep, but insist that some battery operated lights duct taped on will work better than the stock system. So we go to the local Don Quixote shop to get that and a few other bits for the Nimbus. As entertaining as the place is, it must be pure auditory hell for the employees, music and instructional videos blaring in all directions. Or maybe the Japanese just have a different way of coping with noise, witness the various birds chipping or small jingles heard at - say - pedestrian crossings when they go green.

Years ago Axel rode a Nimbus, then some other bikes and eventually calling it quits with two-wheelers. Maybe it'll change, as he is slowly developing som kind of homoerotic relationship to the small Honda Grom. Rasmus - the other Danish bike dealer in Tokyo - just bought one at an auction, and seeing that it is small enough to fit on top of my sidecar when it goes back to Denmark, he could get it sailed back home for free.




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