Written by Dave

Kurume to Mojiko – Good traffic day – (95k, 880M)

Today has to start with our lovely dinner last night with Nancy’s teacher, Chiharu and her husband Yasu. Nancy has been taking on-line classes with Nihongo Picnic for about a year and a half. Chiharu has been Nancy’s sensei the entire time. When you take an online class from overseas, it’s pretty rare that you’ll ever get to meet your teacher in person (or classmates for that matter). Well, we got lucky with our rest day off coming in a place close to where they live and on a day that Chiharu and Yasu were available for dinner. We met them at a restaurant not far from our hotel and had a very fun combined English and Japanese language dinner / laugh session – it was very entertaining. We were having such fun and enjoying our meal so much that we forgot to take any pictures!  Thanks again guys for dinner, it was so nice to meet you and get to know you in person. And thanks for clearing up some of the questions we had about Japan – like the “give way sign” and that it isn’t really fox on the menu when it refers to kitsune – that will help us as we ride onwards.   And Nancy promises to catch up on all of her homework before she gets back to her online classes in November.

We had a longer day planned today and as such, we were up early. We even skipped out on the hotel brekkie as they didn’t start serving until 6:30. We were rolling our loaded bikes through the lobby before 7AM. When we checked in, they asked us to carry the bikes up to our room (they didn’t really want us to take them up at all). Our bikes are very clean and this was sort of silly but we wanted the bikes off the street so we complied. The two night desk guys, still on shift this AM, were not fazed at all by us moving them through the lobby.

We had some traffic but by leaving so early, I’m pretty sure we missed the worst of it. We had about 6k of city riding before Komoot got us onto back roads – from there onwards for the rest of the day, traffic was mild at worst. Mapping this day months ago sitting at our home on the Oregon coast, I was really dreading getting across Fukuoka traffic – turned out to be a breeze.

We had our first morning tea at about 25k and thoroughly enjoy the nice cakes that Chiharu gave us last night at dinner – way better than the normal 7-11 pork bun. We had a second morning tea at a grocery store at about 50k. Here we ate a couple rolls we picked up a couple of days ago and had a liter of 100% grapefruit juice. The juice was a good find as so many of the drinks here are full of added sugar, and having something besides water as a healthy choice was nice.

The profile for the day had two hills that sort of looked like they could be tunnels. Sometimes Komoot gets confused. The first hill was actually a hill and no issue. The second hill was in fact a tunnel and it turned out to be a bit of a rough ride. We had checked on Google street view yesterday and saw there was a sidewalk on the wrong side of the road with a railing that separated it from traffic.  The sidewalk looked relatively wide so we figured it would be okay to ride on that rather than the road.  Well, the Google street view was a bit deceiving, as the sidewalk narrowed as it entered the tunnel and it was about 6 inches too narrow to ride safely. And it was 3.7k long. The first 1/3 was uphill and really hard to ride without bumping bags or shoulders into the walls or railing. Both Nancy and I had minor bonks and ended up getting dirty arm warmers and jerseys from bumping the tunnel walls.

The second 2/3 was slightly downhill and it was much easier to keep in the middle without bumping collisions. It was all smooth sailing until we came upon a Japanese woman walking her bike and had to squeeze by. We made it but no one will get social distancing points for that tight encounter, it was too tight for two bikes and two people to pass. At the far end of the tunnel there were stairs where I had to lift the bikes off the walk way – whose idea was that? And of course, for extra fun, there was a big spider web across the stairs. Oh well, we got there in the end and other than a little dirty, we came through unscathed.

With the late second morning tea, we ended up riding past 1PM holding out for the perfect noodle shop for lunch. One never came and we had to settle for pork buns and 1-2-3 onigiri at 7-11. From there it was only 20k to our accommodation, Grand Base Mojiko. As we were slightly early and knew that we couldn’t check in early (there was an unmanned check-in that wouldn’t allow early check-in), we stopped for a coffee at “World Coffee”. They had a massive sign and clearly were serving coffee from round the world. They did an acceptable pour over and we chewed up enough time for check-in.

On the way to the hotel we got some nice city views of the Kyushu-Honshu bridge, which we will not riding tomorrow, or any day for that matter. Bikes are prohibited. Instead, they have a pedestrian/bicycle tunnel that we’ll use to get back onto Honshu Island. We’ll tackle that after another rest day tomorrow. We don’t have big plans for tomorrow. We originally were thinking we might take the train down to Fukuoka city but we may just do local stuff.

For dinner we headed to a little ramen shop just around the corner from our accommodation.  It was a tiny little place, but the ramen and gyoza were delicious.  The elderly lady running the place said that she and her husband had been running the restaurant for 50 years.  Obviously it’s been a popular place to stay in business that long.