🇯🇵 Day 5 🇯🇵

Sunday meant activity day again for many of the Japanese. We passed rugby players warming up, baseball players with their gear neatly organized and lined up as they got ready for the day’s games. It was interesting to watch them prepare the field and the bleachers with such care for the game ahead.

We saw farmers working in the fields, rice being harvested in quiet rhythm. We ate a little GORP (good old raisins and peanuts) in the morning and departed our Airbnb at 7:30. The morning ride out of Takasaki was beautiful. One of the highlights was stopping at Syorinzan Daruma-ji, where the white Byakue Dai-Kannon bodhisattva statue (representing the goddess of mercy) towers above the trees—white-robed, serene, and 137 feet tall. That’s nearly half the length of an American football field. I ran up a few of the temple stairs pretending to train for Cyclocross Nationals in December we paid the ¥300 each and walked up the stairs inside the statue to overlook the basin below. While high in the 12,000 pound structure, Lisa said one of our funny sayings that is starting to develop as those often do during cycling trips together, “Please don’t let there be an earthquake now.”

A fruit smoothie from 7-Eleven held us over until lunch, which we spent sitting on the steps of a Buddhist temple, enjoying a few rice balls and some chips. The riding was fun and challenging, with steep ascents and smooth descents, and beautiful scenery as we were getting further into the mountains. We rode near a giant beautiful bridge heading into Chichibu, our destination city for the evening.

We’ve been enjoying getting up early and getting in before dark. The sun rises and sets early here in Honshu, so that makes for an early bedtime and an early rise. Tonight there’s a full lunar eclipse at 3:15 AM. We’ve set the alarm. Whether we actually wake up is another story.

We had a few great interactions today. “Bicycle bows” are now officially a thing—our term for doing a Japanese-style bow while riding past other cyclists. Of course we didn’t invent this. We learned from fellow Japanese cyclist. At a local grape stand, 1 mile from our destination, the owner was so proud of their grapes. They gave us a sample, we bought a bunch, and then they handed us another bunch equal to what we’d purchased. A simple act of generosity was a perfect way to end the ride as the temperature on my Garmin computer read 104.6°!

Our lodging tonight is an entire modern Japanese home! We showered, Lisa washed and hung the laundry, and we both took care of the usual post-ride tasks. Then we walked the short distance to the grocery. On the way we found a Recycle Shop—Japan’s version of Goodwill—and found a new bag for the back of the bike, as mine seamed to not repel the rain our first day. It was fun to poke around and see what kind of secondhand treasures were tucked away. At the grocery store we spent a curious hour wandering the isles, looking at interesting Japanese items and buying supplies for dinner and tomorrow’s breakfast. The packaging, the variety, and the layout were all fascinating. We picked up some premade food at the grocery store (fried rice with chicken, salad, yakisoba, and a pudding style dessert, which we later found out was pumpkin, Yum! ) Enjoying the quiet evening together as we sat at the kitchen table reminiscing about the day behind us. The owner and his girlfriend, Sam and Yuki, stopped by—eager to meet us and hear about our adventure. We think Sam may be a bit famous as he has some newsclippings showing him running around Japan and eating different food.

We also had a few small but meaningful moments with clerks and workers at convenience stores and grocery shops—helping us figure out what we were buying, showing us how to run the smoothie machine, and pointing us toward what we needed.

As we sat around after our dessert, drinking the most delicious, low-alcoholic beer I have ever had, I joked with Lisa about one of the embarrassing things that happened to me on multiple occasions on my previous years in Japan was walking out of a Japanese bathroom still wearing the slippers that say トイレ (“toilet”) on them. Nothing says “foreigner” quite like that. A moment later, she almost did that exact thing. 😉Baca lagi