This trip hasn't been smooth sailing so far but I think we are finally getting settle tonight. On arrival at the Gold Coast airport yesterday morning for our flight to Osaka, we found out that our plane had a bird fly into the engine during landing at the Gold Coast. This meant a whole stack of tests were required and the flight was delayed until 3pm at best and may not go at all. Great start!! I had to make a very quick decision and so we switched flights and ended up heading for Tokyo instead. I figured a bullet train to Nagoya and then a drive to the course the following morning, today, would be best. So the first part of that plan went ok, despite being slightly delayed leaving we made up some time and arrived about 7:30pm. By the time we got through immigration and customs it was about 8:40 not leaving too much time to get to Tokyo train station in time to get the last bullet train at 10pm... So this is where the fun really began. We found a private contractor to drive us there who guaranteed us we would make it in time. So by the time we were in the car and ready to leave he had an hour and 15 mins to do the 1hr journey leaving us a small amount of time in the biggest train station in Japan to find the ticket counter and the platform. Little did we know what was about to happen next, I can only say that Red Bull should consider signing this guy for the 2012 season as his driving was nothing short of spectacular!! His foot hit the floor that hard I am sure even Sebastian Vettel would have been left for dead!! Before we knew it he was flying, passing 120km/h, 130, 140, 150, 160 until he finally, or the honda finally said enough is enough and he peaked at 175km/h!!! Now for all you people at home worried about me, I am writing this blog so I did survive. It was an unbelievable journey only punctuated by toll gates and even those were scary moments as he nearly collected 3 boom gates. We arrived to our collective relief at 9:25pm only 40mins for a 1 hr trip.....give the man a trophy!!!
We laughed all the way into the terminal and most of the way to Nagoya about our crazy car trip and how wound up this guy was!! He made his money the hard way and I am not sure what would have happened if the police had of caught him....jail time I suspect!! Anyway we made our hotel in Nagoya by midnight and had a fairly boring car trip to the course this morning and have finally checked in to our hotel for the week.
The course is a new one for finals, which is a good and bad thing. Good in that most guys probably haven't played here but bad in that I played really well at last years venue. I was able to get a practice round today which was nice, to get a bit of the stiffness out after a long day yesterday. I played really nicely actually which was a little surprising given how I was feeling. The course is ok, not the greatest despite some very amazing views and landscapes from some of the tees. The greens are big and heavily sloped from front to back with the downhill putts being incredibly fast. I played the King Course today and will play the Queen course tomorrow in practice before getting started on Thursday. I am looking forward to it and of course the goal is to finish as high as possible, but anywhere inside the top 40 would see me get enough starts on the tour to have a good crack in 2012.
The most disappointing thing of the day is that I found out I could be playing in the Japan Series this week here in Japan. Having won in Wollongong on the Aussie Tour and being a full Japanese Tour member it gave me a start in that event. Due to q school this week I can't play! The real bummer about that is that last prizemoney is $15000 with only 33 players playing for the 1.5 million dollars! What bad timing, why couldn't they have the event next week!!! Anyway that is the news from Japan at the moment but stay tuned for more throughout the week and check out Chris Rolph at work in the photo's below!!!