We took the ferry to Kyushu this morning and then decided to go for a little bike ride with one goal in mind: Make it to Day 13.
As I type this, we are in Nobeoka, making a pit stop at my buddy Guy's house. We will be hitting the road again soon, since our destination for tonight is Miyazaki City.
Good thing we are taking this break, because Jody is in top form as usual, and he is giving me a punishing. If you saw him today, you'd never know that there are more than 2300 kms in his legs from this ride alone. Then again, I am hanging in there just fine.
More later!
OK, I'm back, typing this on an annoying Japanese keyboard that has a tiny, tiny, tiny space bar and that keeps switching from English to Japanese...
Our fairly lengthy pit-stop in Nobeoka was really worthwhile. It gave us a chance to share some ride stories with Guy and his wife, fuel up (nice sandwiches, Kumiko!), do some maintenance (Jody's bike has been making a lot of noise, so he borrowed some tools from Guy to see if he could quickly fix the problem --- no such luck), borrow a pair of gloves (in my case, that is), and buy a new pair of socks (since my one pair was absolutely reeking!).
We made it from Nobeoka to Miyazaki in record time (in other words, really fast!), because, well, as I said earlier and say practically every time I write these posts, Jody is a machine. Granted, I am keeping up with him, but I would never ride this fast by myself.
I checked the weather forecast, and it looks like perhaps the fantastic post-hurricane weather might leave us for a while tomorrow and bring some rain, but maybe we'll get lucky and have another nice day.
We've been telling all sorts of random people about our trip, mostly just saying things like, "We just rode here all the way from Hokkaido, in 12 days." The usual response, as you can imagine, is something like, "Great!" At the beginning of the trip, we were telling people what our destination was, but now that we are almost there, we switched to telling them where we started...
Tomorrow we plan to leave fairly early, probably around 7:30, so that we can finish around 4 or 5 p.m.
Since we are so close to the finish, I have been getting a bit emotional, or at least pretty happy, letting out a bit of a "whoop" or similar exclamation more and more. Naturally, it's very satisfying to have made it this far and I really look forward to finishing this. The excitement probably won't last very long, however, and then we'll both go back to our "normal" lives...
Doing a ride like we are, well, most people just can't relate, so even when we tell them what we are doing, as great as they might think it is, after two or three seconds, they forget what we did. For us, though, it's much greater, since the accomplishment gives us a bit more self-confidence than we had to start with...
Anyway, not much happened during our ride today. We had quite a bit of climbing from Beppu to Nobeoka and then mostly a long, flat stretch into Miyazaki. During the earlier part of the day, we had a lot of headwind to deal with, but later, that was not the case.
OK, that's all for tonight. It's already midnight and time to go to bed.
Talk to you tomorrow!
Today's ride stats:
Distance: 122.95 miles (197.868 km)
Elapsed Time: 13:54:30
Time in Saddle: 7:02:48
Average Moving Speed: 17.4 mph
Maximum Speed: 42.1 mph*
Calories Burned: 7455
Elevation Gain: 3999 ft
Max Elevation: 1222 ft
Average Temp: 78.5 F
*This was a record for C2C and happened on a long descent leading to a town called Ume, near Nobeoka.
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