Counting The Days to Hokkaido

It's been a long three weeks since I last posted anything to this blog. Hopefully, you won't have to wait that long in between posts any more. After all, JJxJ is less than a week away!

By the way, I guess I should explain what "JJxJ" stands for, although I bet some of you have already figured it out:

Jody and Jeremy Cross Japan.

The last ride that Jody and I went on was called "B2B," which stood for "Border 2 Border," so I guess this ride should be called "C2C," or "Cape 2 Cape." Somehow, though, while trying to come up with the best name for this ride, we settled on "JJxJ." For a brief moment, I even tried spelling that with a capital "X" (JJXJ), but Jody vetoed that idea right away.

Yeah, so JJxJ it is.

For now, anyway.

You see, I think it's much better if we change the name to C2C.

Why?

Well, then we won't have to worry about the name for our next ride, whenever that will be, because it will simply be D2D.

Right?

All that's left is coming up with a starting point and a finishing point for that one.

Today, on the spur of the moment, I blurted out "Detroit to Dallas," whereas Jody went with "Denmark to Denali." I guess we'll have to get back to the drawing board on that one.

Anyway, over the past few weeks, I've been doing my best to figure out what route we're going to take so that I could start looking for places to stay. Of course, the route we take depends a lot on the availability of accommodations, so I actually had to find some balance between picking a route first and picking places to stay first.

About the only major (if you can even call it that) change we made was for the first two days of riding. See, originally, I thought we should ride down the western coast of Hokkaido all the way to Sapporo, simply because it looked appealing to ride that far along the water. There seemed to be few places to stay along the way though, so I opted to have us ride down the middle of the island, instead. (We'll actually start off by riding along the eastern coastline before moving inland.)

Also, in order to stay clear of most of the devastation caused by the March earthquake and tsunami, we are riding down the western part of Honshu, Japan's main island.

I'll spare you the details about exactly where we're staying, but I can tell you that our list of accommodations looks like this:

Couchsurfers: 5 nights
Hotels: 5 nights
Friends: 2 nights
My place: 1 night

Besides dealing with where to go and where to stay, Jody and I have pretty much finalized all the other details of the trip, many of which I mentioned in my last post.

The biggest problem we had to tackle was how to get back to Gokase from the finish line, Cape Sata. A few days ago my buddy Guy volunteered to pick us up, however, so how we get home is no longer an issue. Two (big) thumbs up for Guy!

With just six short days to go, about all that's left to do is count down the days to Hokkaido.

In the meantime, I've been telling lots of my friends and colleagues about C2C, and I've gotten all sorts of responses.

Some people think we're crazy. （馬鹿じゃないの？）
Some people think we're great. （すごい！）
Some people think we'll never make it. （無理だ！）
Some people simply wished us luck. （頑張ってね！）

All that really matters is that Jody and I support each other, which we do, and that we are confident in our abilities, which we are.

We did it once on B2B.

We will do it again on C2C.

See you at the finish line!