Best Customer Since the Last Best Customer

I spent last week with a customer. With apologies to my past best customers, he is also my best customer ever. We had originally decided not to take customers this spring, but he sounded too perfect when I talked to him on the phone. He was perfect. Even when I told him the first two days are someplace I would like to explore, but have never ridden myself. he readily agreed. When I told him he may have to sleep in a shrine or graveyard, he readily agreed. When it was pouring cold rain he never complained. He begged to have Tomoe's macrobiotic cooking instead of complaining "Where's the meat?". And, best of all, the hardest part was getting him to put his camera away so we could stay on schedule. He could have spent an hour just in a fifty square meter radius of our house.

I want to go trough an hour by hour story, but I have other things to do. Instead, I will give you the bullet-point version:

• Attempt to ride to coast (I get hypothermic and we have to hitch a ride to the nearest inn)
• Sleep with 15 junior high-school girls (they were in different rooms than us, but technically we slept in the same inn.)
• Spend ten hours riding 85km to our second day's inn. (awesome!)
• My Camera brakes and I loose two days worth of photos.
• We boil eggs in the hot-spring.
• A knee injury allows us to Catch a ride from the inn-keeper (Ikesho) to our home where Simon explores on his own and I vacuum.
• Next day we pick bamboo shoots, cook and eat them with our neighbors at the local festival.
• I am too drunk to do the rice planting, so we put it off until early the next morning.
• After planting rice we head to Akiyamago where we spend the night at Naebaso inn - a 400+ year old inn where we enjoy a traditional meal of wild vegetables and bear meat.
• Wake up early and head to the Mt Naeba Opening Ceremony. Take lots of photos.
• Climb Mt Naeba (one of Japan's 100 famous mountains)
• Wake up the next day at 4 am
• Hike down and happy to find that the bikes we hid in the forest had not been stolen.
• Ride down to the great outdoor bath only to find it closed.
• Ride to another outdoor bath that is too hot to sit in for more than five minutes.
• Visit the sake brewery that is closed in the summer (sake is best brewed in the winter), but offers all-you-can-drink tastings. Perfect for the remaining ride down the hill!

Yes, it was over a week ago, but I feel I should acknowledge one of my best customers. I feel like I should have paid him.