I had a long weekend, and while it wasn’t as
productive or adventurous as I had hoped, it could have been worse too. There
was a huge typhoon, apparently the strongest in sixty years, so it rained all
day on Saturday. I had planned to do a bike trip, but people kept giving the warning
not to go outside in the typhoon, so I stayed home all day. Then it also rained
on Monday too, and since that was forecast, I changed my plan to a one-day bike
trip. I went to Kiso-Fukushima, which I had been to before, about 43 km away,
so about 90 km round trip with a few detours. It took me 2 hours 45 minutes to
come back, which I did with minimal resting. I stopped in Naraijuku to buy some
souvenirs, and in Kiso-Fukushima I went to the supermarket to browse, so
altogether the trip was about 7.5 hours.
Kiso-Fukushima is a really beautiful town. It
is closely hemmed in by mountains and is very hilly, but also has several
bridges going over streams. Overall, it was a great trip, with the worst part
being a 2 km tunnel just after Naraijuku with a narrow footpath. Aside from
that, there was very little difficulty or danger. My only dissatisfaction was
that I had to come back the same way I went.
I thought as I was biking that perhaps the
main deterrent from my making these trips was because of difficulty sleeping in
my hammock. I have tried four times and have not succeeded once in sleeping
more than four hours. The prospect of physically exhausting myself only to set
up camp and have a nearly sleepless night is hardly appealing, so maybe
traveling without the intent to camp will motivate me more. Granted, then I’ll
have to pay for accommodation, but biking will save nearly half the cost of
travel in addition to providing a reason for the travel.
However, this revelation may have come too
late. There’s only one more long weekend left this year, and I really want to
use it to go to Nagoya. Biking to Nagoya would probably take two full days, and
I’d like to have more time than that. January and February are really cold, but
if I get a nice weekend without snow then maybe I can bike somewhere. Most
likely though, if I want to take a decent trip, I’m going to have to wait until
the end of my contract.
