JAPAN: Ride Day 3

I haven’t mentioned that riding on the left side of the road is easy.  It would be a little more difficult if we had traffic circles, but we don’t. We’ve been riding around this peninsula for three days now on what looks like the major road.  But there’s not much traffic.  We’re not sure why but we’ll take it.

First thing this morning is a lesson in decorating chop sticks.  We get a lesson from a master then each get to create our own version.  It looked so easy when the instructor demonstrated.  But it wasn’t and most of us are not proud of our creations.  To get to the class, we had to walk through  the extensive farmer’s market.

 

 

Remember yesterday I mentioned there is a hill with 1,000 rice patties?  Actually, it’s 1004; I counted them.  Past the rice patties, we came upon a decorated river; we have no idea what this is about. (It’s an annual “Boys Day”.) There were hundreds of fish banners strung across the river.  It was much more colorful than the picture shows.

 

 

 

Cycling along the road you undoubtedly miss a lot. Probably not as much as whizzing  by in a car, but still a lot. Not missed below was a man drying seaweed.  The last  photo was when we were at a rest/water stop.  We were sitting at a table, chatting when this Japanese man in a suit walked up and asked “Anyone got a camera?”  I fished mine out of the handlebar bag, we posed and he said “cheeseburger”,  took the photo, gave me back the  camera and disappeared in a nearby bus.

 

Tomorrow is the longest day of the tour.  I’m not looking forward to it; the previous three days have been tough enough. But on Sunday is sort of a rest day.  We take a train to the northwest portion of Gifu to begin more cycling on Monday