Written by Dave

Tokushima to Toyokunizaki Auto Camp – Last night in the tent – (24k, 146M)

We got to sleep in this morning as we only had about 6k to ride to reach the Wakayama ferry. Starbucks opened at 8AM so Nancy ran down and got us proper coffees. I offered to do it but she knew that this was false economy offer. I’d annoy the Starbucks team and get the wrong coffees. It’s just so much easier if we let Nancy do the Japanese as she has all trip.

It took us almost 20 minutes to get our fully loaded bikes down from our room on the 12^th floor to the lobby. Only 2 of the hotel’s 3 lifts were in service but the bigger issue was the bikes. Japanese tend to not to ride on the lifts with us in general. Throw in a bit of fluorescent clothing, bike shorts, a helmet and a loaded bike, well, we might as well be from Mars. Every time a lift stopped on level 12, there were a couple folks on it from higher floors. We just sent them onwards, it’s not worth the effort. Eventually we both managed to summon empty cars and made our way down. Though we did still get the entertainment value when stopping at floors 11-1 and watch a gung-ho Japanese person step towards the lift, see one of us, and take two quick steps backwards. All and all, a very entertaining start to the day.

The ride to the ferry was easy being Sunday morning. We had more than enough time to ride to the wrong ferry terminal, ride back to the correct one and still be over an hour early. We hung out in the passenger area for about 20 minutes, until the ferry lady that told us to go stand in the sun at the end of row 8 came out of the ferry terminal to remind us of her instructions. Never mind that the inbound ferry was not yet in port and wouldn’t be for another 30 minutes. It was almost as entertaining as the lift in the hotel – haha.

The ferry ride, our 12^th was not choppy but there were some swells. It was two hours long but Nancy did fine (again). She noticed the swells but had her Kindle and her wrist bands and had no issues. I think we may need to stop worrying about ferries, right Nancy? Loading and unloading the ferry was all a bit of a Keystone Cops affair, I think that they may have had a new crew. Either that or being only half full they decided to play around with folks loading, just for fun. Oh well, we got there in the end.

We arrived in Wakayama about 1PM and agreed to find some place to eat before taking on the hill between the port area and camp. We stopped at what was most likely a Japanese fast food restaurant – cheap and cheerful, with more than enough character to entertain us. Today we both opted for rice dishes as we wanted something different. Both orders were good but luckily, I didn’t go whole hog with the Sichuan chili or else it would have killed me. It was really spicy.

The ride over the hill to the other side of the lower Osaka peninsula where the campground is located was mostly city riding until we reached the part where it was too steep for building. I got a 12% on my computer at one point and it was a bit of grind but we’d ridden so little today, it almost felt we had to work hard at some point if we were going to earn all the food we’ve been eating. Riding down the back side to camp I had to reassure Nancy a couple times that we didn’t have to ride back up that hill tomorrow.

We are staying at the Toyokunizaki Auto Camping ground. It’s a nice piece of land next to the sea above a guy’s house and he’s turned it into a small 20 site campground. It doesn’t have showers but otherwise it is ok. The views out over the Osaka Bay are nice. We had dinner on a bench watching planes fly into Osaka’s Kansai Airport. It’s funny to think we’ll be on a plan flying out of there pretty soon. Our time in Japan is coming to a close.

Tomorrow we have another short ride back to our same inbound Osaka Airport hotel. We have 4 nights there. The extra nights come in part because we built in a few more bad weather days into our schedule than we ended up needing. We didn’t really need to use our rain days after all. We should have plenty of time tomorrow to get the bikes boxed and get ready for a few tourist days in Osaka. More on that and a full trip summary will be posted in due course.