Here we are, standing in front of the house that we had the pleasure of sleeping in the previous night. We actually made it to within 100 meters of the place before having to call for the exact location. Our gracious couchsurfing hosts, Akihiro and his mother, took good care of us. As you might be able to tell by the look on our faces (we slept really well, but we still look tired), we got another early start (this photo was taken at 7:22 a.m.), because we had a second consecutive huge day ahead of us. Unfortunately, neither of us took many pictures that day, so we can't show you much of what we experienced. I didn't even take a picture of the monster hill that we had to climb immediately after we started out. Just what we love: Climbing hills without any warm-up. We did have a choice of going downhill and backtracking a bit along the route we had come on the night before, but we preferred the shortcut, so up, up, up it was.
Since I've lived in Germany, for a second I thought I was dreaming when I saw this "Spar" supermarket. I would have liked to have gone in and taken a look to see if they had any products that you don't normally find here in Japan, but this was one of those days with no time to spare, or rather, no time to Spar!
This picture isn't all that special, but it does show me (in a sense) in my usual position, tucked in behind my fearless leader, as well as a bunch of mountains that we were heading right for. We knew the climb(s) we were facing that morning weren't going to be all that daunting, and we actually both love climbing (bring it on!), but still, when you're only one hour in to a 250-kilometer day and you're already pedaling uphill, well, you're not necessarily the happiest of campers.
Here we are, nearly an hour later, grinding our way up through the mountains. A couple of minutes later, a surprise was waiting for us.
The surprise was Fabio, a fellow cape-to-cape rider who I had been in touch with. We were actually planning to meet him that night in Hakodate, but he was bitten by a bit of bad luck along the way and therefore fell behind schedule. We didn't know about that, however, until we saw him ahead of us, pushing his bicycle up the mountain. If you think we are crazy, check out Fabio's set-up! Besides all of that extra weight he's carrying along, he's riding solo (he's still underway somewhere near Tokyo as I write this). I'm telling you, the guy's gut guts! Anyway, we still had a long way to go and didn't want to lose our momentum, so after chatting for a quick few minutes and taking some pictures, off we went. I would have loved to have hung out more with Fabio, but we were on a mission. If all goes well, though, I just might meet him when he's closer to my neck of the woods, possibly in about a month.
Here's Jody, taking one of his patented self-portraits, about 15 minutes after we said goodbye to Fabio. Still climbing.
The end is near. It's just before 10 a.m. and Jody is about to go over the pass...
The problem is, I figured we were going to stop at the top to refill our (my!) empty water bottles and perhaps pick up some food (calories!), but by taking this second picture at the top I allowed Jody to pull away just enough so he couldn't hear me yelling at him to stop. I had no choice but to continue on down the mountain as well. Later, Jody told me that he doesn't like to stop at the top of climbs because it's usually cold at the pass and you can and get your provisions at the bottom. Fair enough. Besides, I should have remembered that little trick of his from B2B... This picture also shows that there was some rain on the way, but, luckily, not that much.
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Unfortunately, that's all the pictures we have of Day 3. We don't have any pictures of the tire repair job we did, we don't have any pictures of the coastline that we finally made it back down to, we don't have any pictures of any of the other roads we were on, and we don't have any pictures of the food we ate or anything else we experienced that day. Day 3 was simply one, long day! I guess I was simply mentally drained and in no mood to be taking pictures. Sorry!
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