The Japanese emperor in Hawaii
The Japanese emperor has been on a visit to Hawaii during the last few days, which we knew since it was all over the news. I didn’t think we would notice anything from it (besides the news, that is), but, all of the sudden, we were almost in front of a road closure, in the middel of the freeway.
Imagine yourself, you’re driving on a freeway with three lanes, in the middle of Honolulu, and all the sudden you notice police lights in front of you… right, could be as you can often see those lights over here, but all the sudden we were driving slower and slower, until we were standing still, about two or three cars behind the police cars. The first thoughts were that there was an accident, but soon we thought it was for the emperor. They close every road when there are high visitors, such as the Japanese emperor, all so they don’t have to be afraid to be stopped in traffic, with the risk of a terrorist attack.
So we thought it was nice to know that we were so close, but we probably would not notice a thing of it, other than the road closure. Until we noticed a couple of police cars, driving next to us, followed by a long and black limousine, complete with the American flag on the right and the Japanese flag on the leftside. That had to be the emperor and empress of Japan. Behind them were a lot of other cars, vans and such for the imperial household, and behind them a lot of other police cars.
When the motorcade passed us, we were allowed to drive also, even though it was behind a couple of police cars which were holding us awfully far away from the imperial couple. Since we were so far up front, it actually felt like we were part of the motorcade haha.
Oh well, we did not see the emperor and his wife in flesh and blood, which wouldn’t have been easy as they only had one public appearance during the last two days that they have been on the island and there were hundreds of people who went there, so I didn’t really felt like going. Oh well, it was fun that they drove so close next to us.
For a while I felt bad as I thought that we did not bring a video or photo camera, but it turned out that Michelle actually told me that she brought her camera but that I did not respond to her. I really didn’t notice her saying that, which is a shame, otherwise I could show some photo’s or a video, made by ourselves.
Oh well, don’t be sad. I can still give you something to show you a bit how the motorcade looked like as I have found a video of the freeway camera’s 
It is during the day, and we only saw them in the evening, but oh well, it is the same motorcade and it’s better than nothing. Here it is:
