According to the people at club Tocoo it was not possible to go from Centrair to Atsugi in three hours, So we started at 06:00 to be in time for our base visit on Atsugi at 10:00. Maintaining a high cruise speed (we recently found out that 80 km/h is the limit anyway) we arrived with plenty of time to spare at Atsugi to begin our visit. We where greeted at the gate by Matthew Schwartz of the NAF Atsugi PAO to start our visit. The CAW was at that moment preparing for a deployment and most planes had just returned from their practice week at MCAS Iwakuni.

Starting the tour at VFA-102, courtesy of Lt. Enos, the squadron's part-time PAO (he also does F-18's in his daytime job) we could see the CAW was busy packing for the deployment. According to our guide the ground crews are ready within days, compared to the Stateside units who need several weeks to get ready for deployment. One of the advantages of being on the ready almost all of the time. Opposed to rules in the States, squadrons are allowed to paint their show bird in full colour. This makes them really popular with the Japanese aircraft enthusiasts and us as well. VF-102 only has the F model of the F/A-18, because they have the tanker role in the wing. Flying the F/A18-F with a complete set of tanks is not as challenging as its looks, so we where told. The onboard computers come in handy, but the additional drag with five big tanks is a bummer. Early production  F/A-18E/F wings also have the stores stations pointed a few degrees inward, which adds drag altogether. Newer ‘block’ numbers therefore have the wingpoints ‘straightened out’.

 Luckily our guide knew exactly what we wanted to see and before we could ask we where all over the fighter platform. This gave us the opportunity to get all the squadron birds that where on the platform. NAS Atsugi has platforms on both sides of the runway, this meant for us that we where going to miss the choppers, which are based on the other side because we were running out of time. And we would be back later in the week anyway.

With the traffic being very busy the progress trough Tokyo was slow, this gave us more than enough time to work out the navigation system. After leaving Tokyo we made up on the road to Sendai, where we would spend the night a famous traditional Japanese Youth Hostel. Sadly Sendai is too big to easily find the local youth hostel, especially in the evening, in pouring rain. After driving around for a while we asked again in a shop and a friendly guy on his moped was willing to guide us trough the rain to the youth hostel, a 20 min drive. On arrival he was soaking wet and told us that he was happy to be able to help us and went off.