An Experience of Joy
We had a wild adventure this week. We are staying at a 100-year-old ferry station and tea house in a fishing village on the Koza River right where it opens into the vastness of the Pacific. It’s a gorgeous experience to be away from the city, witnessing life in a small, quiet coastal village.
The train only comes through the station every few hours. And yesterday we hopped the train from the nearby town of Kushimoto (check out the rock formations) but didn’t realize that the only way to exit the train at our tiny station was to leave from the first car after paying the conductor. We rushed from the second car when we realized our mistake but it was too late and the train was already pulling away.
So it’s 7pm and getting dark and we get off the at next station a few miles away…enough to make walking with the kids an impossibility. We debated whether to wait for the next train in an hour or venture through the quiet residential community to see if the one restaurant on our map was open (Google says it was, but it isn’t always right). We found the restaurant (called Joy) and let ourselves into a living room bar where an elderly couple snubbed their cigarettes and jumped into action. They rearranged the furniture to accommodate the five of us (Suzanne is here with us now, YAY!) and shared a menu of their homestyle cooking.
We ordered and in broken Japanese I explained our mishap. The owner grabbed her train schedule and after conferring with her husband, apologized that there would be no good trains for us that evening and then insisted that they drive us back to our Airbnb.
It was all so unbelievable — the luck that they were open and willing to put us up for dinner, the delicious homecooking that appeased everyone’s tastes, and then the insistence on driving us home. They drove two cars so we wouldn’t have to squeeze in one. They wouldn’t take money or even our attempt to bring them a box of cookies from the house.
They were so kind. We were so cared for. It was an unforgettable moment in travel. May we learn to offer that sort of generosity to stranger in our future.
