Today was certainly...a day. It started out auspiciously. We both woke up around 5:30, "ready" to get moving. A little later than hoped for, but I had forced myself to stay awake to finish grading (I did!) and there was no way I was getting up any earlier. Sumi has never once passed up an opportunity to sleep in, so there we were, wheeling our bikes through Itami Airport (which is a very nice airport, by the way. Small, so there were not many people around, but very nice amenities. Let's backtrack a little to yesterday:
We arrived at about 7PM, after transferring from Narita. I had forgotten about the need to transfer, but it was fairly painless. I remember practically nothing about the flight. I fell asleep before they even did their "point out the safety features of this aircraft" spiel, and woke up as we are descending into Itami. We had booked a room at the hotel in the airport, as we knew we would be exhausted, and still need to assemble our bikes. The airport hotel is essentially the third floor of the airport, with a lounge and some rooms off the lobby. Again, small but nice.
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| Itami's mascot, Sora-yan |
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| Small display in the hotel lobby |
We checked in, then ran down to the terminal to get some food. We chose a pasta place that looked decent, and settled down to order. While reading the menu, a waitress came over and offered us an English menu. We didn't really need one, but took it anyway, and noticed something odd about it:
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| Check the prices |
Apparently there is an English surcharge? You hear about his in other countries, where things cost double or more if you don't speak the native language. This was more like rounding up to the nearest yen. I found it pretty amusing. Sumi wasn't too happy. We ordered with the Japanese menu, in Japanese. We paid the Japanese prices. I was kind of hoping she'd charge us the English rates so I could ask about it, but no reason to torment a poor waitress over something like that.
So, back up in the room, we assembled our bikes, then packed up everything we weren't going to need while on the road in our cases, and brought them to the front desk to ship them to our final destination in Miyajima. That is all of the planning we've done this go-round. We know we'll end up in Miyajima for a few days, but how we get there, where we'll stay, etc. is a mystery at this point. After that, it was a familiar scene. Sumi passes out, Sean works until he passes out.
So back to wheeling the bikes out of the airport. We get outside, and head to the nearest convenience store, which was, predictably, a block away, as that is the only thing open this early in Japan, for a quick breakfast before departing. Our plan was to bike up into the mountains just north of the city, then follow the west a ways. How far, we hadn't decided. Its a good thing, too.
We started rolling, but after a few minutes, Sumi was noticing one of her pedals wobbling. It turns out that the right crank was completely stripped, so the pedal couldn't screw in, and thus, there was nothing holding it in the bike. How this happened we still don't know. It was fine when we had them serviced back home before leaving. We knew it was beat up, as we had some issues with it before, but nothing like this. Long story short, Sumi can't cycle with one pedal, so we were stuck finding a bike shop to try and get this fixed. And so the adventure begins...
The last few trips we have rented a portable WiFi device, and it has been a lifesaver each trip. Well, it earned its keep in the first hour. Sumi located a few bikes shops in the area, and one that was about a mile away. Now, in Japan, nothing opens early except the odd western restaurant or a konbini. Nothing. It's 6:15am, and the bike shop doesn't open until 10am, according to the website. Well, we're stuck, so we walked our bikes up to the store to make sure it was actually still there (that happens sometimes), and found it
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| Wait what's that sign say? |
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| That does not look like a 10... |
OK, so now we have 4 hours to wait, instead of 3. Well, there was a nice-looking park just a few blocks away that we passed on the way up, so we locked up the bikes, ran a few errands, then walked back to the park. It was actually a perfect spot. There were a few picnic tables under a structure, a man raking the dirt, a woman playing fetch with her rather large dog, and a few old guys busying themselves with something that turned out to be a sport.
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| Just excited to be here... |
Adapting existing sports to suit elderly people in Japan seems to be a thing. A few years ago, we came across a big Gate Ball tournament (a team croquet variant). This morning it was
Ground Golf, which is an odd variant on golf done on a small scale. So, while watching them play, I entered grades (thanks portable WiFi!), while Sumi came up with a plan and napped. The weather was perfect (~70F and overcast), and if you're going to be stranded somewhere, this wasn't a bad place to be.
Finally, as 11am approached, we headed back to the bike shop, and waited for them to open, which they did, promptly, at 11. This shop, Cycling Base Asahi, is a chain of stores in the region. They had a decent selection of stuff, and two guys who did repairs. Well, how we got this lucky, I don't know, but we found the one bike shop in Japan who's two repairmen both had (different) speech impediments and spoke with a medium heavy Kansai accent. Trying to explain the problem and, worse understand their response, as our first real Japanese interaction of the trip was something else. They were, thankfully, knowledgable and friendly, saw the issue, agreed we needed a new crank and could get us one...in a week.
Once I explained we only had about 10 days of biking, one of them MacGyver-ed Sumi's pedal with some cable ties. It looked atrocious and I was convinced it wouldn't work, but it did. It wasn't a fix, but it meant we could ride to some other stores. There was another store in the area we had passed on because it looked like a building that threw up bicycle parts after a night of heavy drinking from the pictures we had seen.
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| TV dramatization. Not the actual store. |
But, desperate times...We stopped in to Daiwa Cycle, and the man took a look at the bike. Thankfully, he did not have a speech impediment. He agreed the crank needed replacing and disappeared into the bowels of his tiny shop, emerging a few minutes later with, of all things, a Shimano Tiagra 3-gear crank. This thing was an exact duplicate of what we have on our bikes, but a slightly upgraded model. How and why he had one sitting in his shop, we'll never know, but it was perfect! He was worried it might be a little expensive, but ¥8000 (around $80) installed was cheaper than you could buy one online. He had it installed in a few minutes, and we were all set. So, had we ignored appearances and come here first, we would have saved a lot of time. Also, he opened at 10am. (sigh)
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| The actual Daiwa Cycle shop |
So, after a 6 hour delay, we were...not ready to hit the road. We hadn't eaten since early in the morning and were starving. The bike shop was located right next to both a train station and Osaka University, so a steady flow of college students on this tiny street also meant several cheap restaurants. We opted for the tiny Indian restaurant 'More', across the street from Daiwa Cycle. Needless to say, it was tasty
The waiter asked us if we wanted it spicy. That was like asking me if I wanted to breathe. So, in short order, we had two piping hot Premium Curry Sets, complete with extra spicy sauces. I actually didn't even need to add anything. It was a good amount of heat and good, different flavor. Almost Indian meets Mexican, with a good amount of chili powder along with other spices. And all you could drink mango juice.
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| Now THAT is naan! Vegetable curry, salad, all you can eat naan and rice. Perfect college restaurant. |
Finally, at 1pm, we were ready to start biking! We decided to do the not-scenic-but-quick ride (oh the irony) to Akashi, a town about 10 miles east of Himeji, where we wanted to spend some time tomorrow. It was about a 35 mile ride, which should have been about 4 hours, given all the stop lights and city traffic.
Yup, should have been. After spending the first hour or so trying to leave Itami and wondering why it felt like we were biking in circles, we realized the map app we were trying to use (maps.me) kept updating our route every few minutes based on where we were, but doing such a bad job, we literally WERE cycling in a circle. OK, fine. We switched to Apple Maps and the route...took us right back to the airport. Literally almost 8 hours later we were right back where we started. But it was a beautiful day, and we were still excited to get moving! So off we went, down the busy streets of the suburbs of Osaka.
Passing through Ashiya, Nishinomiya, and Kobe was like one long upscale Japanese suburb. They were all very nice, well maintained areas. And somehow, all afternoon, we kept missing turns. It must have been jet lag that we didn't know existed, because this has never been a problem for us. But we kept going too far south. Like five times. And each time we'd have to stop, figure out how to get back on track, and, as Siri loves to say, "proceed to the route". Up a small mountain, the down only to find we were no longer on the route and either could backtrack up the mountain (heh, yeah right) or reroute. This continued into the evening, and as the sun was setting, and after the sun had set. Finally, we arrived at our hotel, the perfectly Engrish-named "Rincorn Hotel" (its supposed to be the Lincoln Hotel). It took us roughly 15 hours to travel 35 miles.
Finally, checked in to the hotel, showered, grabbed a yogurt for dinner, and...I forced myself to stay up, entering and finalizing grades while Sumi passed out before I even finished showering. After a painful hour, I finally finished all of my work for the semester, and likewise passed out to the sounds of there trains flying by outside our window.
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| Hello Kitty construction barriers. Seriously. |
