After the left-hand turn, there was water to our right, for the first time in a long time. We were finally on the home stretch of C2C! Even though we saw all those mountains ahead of us, we thought we were going to be riding around them, not up them. Too bad for us, we were wrong.
Initially, however, we didn't have to do any climbing. Here we are, thirty minutes later, at 2:42 p.m., still hugging the coastline. In the far right of the picture, you can see some land jutting out. At that point, we were so close to the end that we were getting incredibly anxious to finally see the finish line. Every time we went around a bend, we wondered when the road would finally end. Somewhere around here, Jody and I made our very last pit stop at a convenience store. When I asked the clerk how far we had to go, I was convinced he'd reply, "It's only about 10K." Instead, he told me it was about one hour by car. "One hour!? By car!? Are you serious!?" "Yes, for sure." Ugh. That meant at least two more hours of riding. All day long, I kept trying to estimate when we would make it to the cape. I was sure we'd be at there by about 3:30 p.m. at the very latest, but my calculations were obviously off. Now it looked more like a 4:30 arrival time.
When the sun decided to poke her nose out from behind the clouds with about an hour of pedaling to go, Jody decided to pull over to put some sunscreen on. Can you detect a bit of frustration on his part? (That's a rarity, indeed!) And no, he's not (mildly) upset because of the sun, but rather because the ride was, as I already mentioned, seemingly taking forever to end. Also, you probably can't tell, but just about here is where the road started to go from flat to hilly to hillier. In a rather unexpected and cruel twist of fate, we were really going to have to earn the last part of the 2600 km ride from Cape Soya to Cape Sata.
Just after we hit the road again, my buddy Guy and his wife Kumiko drove by. (The plan was for them to pick us up at the cape, so that was working out well.) Seeing familiar faces once again put smiles on both of our faces. It was also awesome to have someone taking pictures (and videos) of us riding. The ride wasn't over, but in a sense we now felt we were on our victory lap.
We were more than happy to show off a bit for the cameras. Jody noticeably(!) upped the pace and refused to slow down even when we hit some pretty serious climbs a bit later. I stuck to him like glue, though, since there was no way I was going to be dusted with friends watching. Still, I think Jody underestimated how much climbing we had left.
For some reason, the photojournalist in me failed to do his job at some key points on this ride. Chalk that up to me being overexcited, I suppose. Yeah, so here's a shot of Jody climbing up one of the final climbs to the cape, at 4:39 p.m. What I failed to get, however, was a picture of us arriving at the toll booth entrance to this parkland about five minutes earlier. Believe it or not, we had to pay ¥500 each to enter the park in order to finish our ride, which was yet another bit of salt in the wound, if you will. Oh, and the woman we paid was trying to tell us that we really had to hurry, because there was some kind of gate about 2 km ahead at the end of the road that supposedly closed at 5 p.m. Since the road was primarily uphill, we freaked out a bit, thinking that we might not make it. Wouldn't that be ridiculous? Were we going to have to wait until the morning to finish the ride? Was the headline of the day going to be: So close, yet so far!? "This can't be happening," I thought to myself. "No, no, please no!" Our hearts began to race, as did we on our bikes. Off we went, yet again, totally unsure of what lay ahead.
No comments:
Post a Comment