The Mainichi Daily is Japan’s English tabloid of record and proud of it. And I mean that as a complement. They regularly pick up interesting but easily-missed tidbits such as news about a toilet that exploded in a hospital. I don’t know if I should be proud, but my father has now made it onto the paper.

My father is embarking on a 2500-mile journey down Route 66 as I write this. He and four other post-retirement buddies over 60 are driving from Chicago to Los Angeles. My dad is driving the accompanying car while the others drive Harley Davidsons. It’s a total guy thing although my poor mom is being dragged along for reasons that are unclear. My father, who can be convincing when he wants to, has somehow managed to get people to cover this trip, and the Mainichi Daily  is one of them. (He’s also gotten Harley Davidson to donate jackets and bike rentals, Toyota to provide the car, and a number of hotels to provide lodging. I don’t know if I should be proud of him or embarassed.)

Anyway, if you’re interested in what they’re up to over the next two weeks, the Web site will get updated every day apparently, courtesy of reporter George Itagoshi. I wish George bon courage. I can’t imagine what it might be like to go on a roadtrip planned by my father, who is not, let me tell you, a planner by nature.

We’re in Sri Lanka on vacation. We’re in the southern part of Sri Lanka on the beach right now, but before this, we spent five nights in tea country — land of the Ceylon tea. We stayed in renovated bungalows — old estate houses – that are owned by the Dilmah tea company. Everywhere we turned, we were surrounded by rows and rows of tea bushes, and of course a factory tour was a must see.

The gentleman that took us around was the resident manager at our favorite bungalow known as Tientsin, so-called because of a Chinese connection that I didn’t quite understand. “Mr. Jeremy” is a third generation Sri Lankan tea planter and was formerly the supervisor of the tea estate where the bungalow is located. If you wanted to get a sense of what it must have been like during the Colonial times, you only have to see him. He has a somewhat pompous air of benevolence and a sense of ownership of everything around him. “Plantation owner” would be the description that comes to my mind.

Mr. Jeremy, who was also the activities director for the Tientsin bungalow, was kind enough to take us around. Because he had worked in the business, he was a font of information. One of the more interesting things he told us was about the tea that Wal-mart buys.

As any fan of tea knows, there are different grades of tea. The cheapest is what they call dust. It’s literally the dust that remains after they’ve graded a batch of tea. This is also what the locals mostly drink with a lot of milk and sugar. They don’t even see any of the good tea because most of that gets exported. Wal-mart, Mr. Jeremy said, buys the next cheapest tea after dust quality. They take that and perfume it to mask the fact that the actual tea hardly has any flavor. I’ve never bought Wal-mart tea so I don’t know what the brand is called, but it gives an interesting tho probably not surprising insight on the quality of the stuff.

Mr. Jeremy also had another tidbit to share about Lipton’s. Apparently, Lipton’s tea is no better in the United States, but it ships a higher grade of tea to Japan. That probably explains a little why Lipton’s has ultra-fancy tea cafes in Tokyo. They made me laugh when I first arrived in Tokyo, but if they serve decent quality tea, Lipton’s probably doesn’t have the cheap brand image it does in the United States.