Our weekend

This past Saturday we drove to Morioka City, which is the capital of Iwate prefecture. We went to shop for clothes for Conan and to look at bunk beds to begin decorating the spare bedroom for Conan and eventually the new baby. We're not sure when Conan will feel ready to move to his room by himself, but but we want to have it ready in advance so he can become accustomed to it. On our way shopping, we had a little surprise with our car. The transmission started emitting a strange noise, causing the car to shudder, then a few seconds later, there was a loud "clunk" followed by the wheels locking up. The car screeched to a halt in the middle of the lane. Fortunately, the car behind us saw our car was doing something unusual and stopped in time. The next car noticed a little too late that traffic had stopped, and ended up hitting the car behind us; though with only slight damage. It took a while to clear the road of our car and the others, so I had to direct traffic for a while. Junko called her father, who in turn hooked another company car to the large flatbed tow truck their family business owns. He then came to meet us, dropped off the other car for us to use and towed ours back. We then continued on our way. All in all, it actually only set back our plans by two hours. We were fortunate that the incident wasn't worse. Stopping on the curve of a busy road is not the safest thing to do if you can avoid it. :)