Previous Day (Day 9)

Day 10
???, Yamagata - Fukushima, Fukushima

Distance: 94.89 km
Average: 20.5 km/h
Max: 50.1 km/h
Total Distance: ~836.02 km

Final day (finally writing the last one of these).

I woke up, packed up, and headed out. The weather wasn’t quite as rainy today; it switched back and forther between clear and a light rain, but I still kept my rain coat on for most of it due to the weather still being colder than I would have preferred.

The biggest part of the day (and what took up a couple hours of riding), was the final push back over the mountain range that’s the dividing line between western and central Fukushima-ken, though to be fair I was actually in Yamagata-ken (the prefecture that borders Fukushima to the northwest).

One of the most fun things about riding up these mountains is that they’re full of switchbacks carving their way up the mountain. This means that during your slow ziggzagging up the mountain side you can usually look up real real real far and see the road where you’ll be in an hour or more, even though as the crow flies it’s really quite close.

Where I’m going

See, it’s a great (read: sinking) feeling to look up and see that road above you that’s really quite close yet will take seemingly forever to get to because there’s a looooot of actual road (off to the left of the picture, tangled around the mountain) between where you are and where you can see. You also can’t tell from that photo because it’s a cell phone that has bad dynamic range, but up in the washed-out portions at the top of the photo there’s another road higher up–the road this photo was actually supposed to be of, because…

Where I came from

This is another photo from closer to the top (actually just below the cloud line) in the opposite direction, just to get a feeling of where I came from. I had passed through that city way in the distance in the morning.

I pointed out that the prior photo was just below the cloud line to illustrate that about 50 meters further down the road this is the view that greeted me, in the same direction as the previous photo.

Diminished visibility

Continuing onward, I ran across a big sign celebrating the entrance into Fukushima prefecture, and even more surprisingly… into Fukushima city. This confused me because I knew I still had a good 55 km or so before I was back into the main city. I didn’t realize that the city limits extended all the way into the boonies on the mountains.

A few minutes later I was suddenly in Miyagi prefecture, and about twenty minutes later it went back into Fukushima-ken. It seems that the highway just kisses the borders. This also brings up a good point, that once you got to the top of the mountain the ‘highway’ switched to a one-lane road. I suppose it’s understandable, as for the two or three hours I spent going up then back down the mountain the amount of cars I saw numbered in the single-digits.

The single-laned prefectural highway

Now back on the Fukushima side of the range, I noticed some great examples of Japanese money being devoted to unused infrastructure and destroying natural beauty at work. Here we have the wall of concrete.

Ginormous retaining wall

And here we have a quite long brand new bridge that leads to a one-lane highway that sees about eight cars every two hours.

Long brand new bridge with nothing around

But it’s ok, because at least the surprising amount of monkeys in the area make good use of it… by sitting in the middle of the road for some reason. I couldn’t get a good picture of a pack of monkeys sitting in the middle of the bridge (which would then run to the side and hang on to the edge when I passed), so here’s a photo from a distance of a soliatry monkey sitting in the road.

Lonely little monkey on the road

I didn’t document it, but there were also loads of infrastructure construction going on around here. Dump trucks and construction equipment passing me on the road with construction of more bridges and huge concrete walls underway. It’s such a rural area that would only attract a very negligible amount of tourists and thus, traffic needing such infrastructure, so outside of simply wasting funds I really don’t understand what they’re doing.

But I digress.

The rest of the trip was just same old ride that I’ve done multiple rides, going past the Moniwa Dam, through Iizaka, then finally back to Fukushima, where I went to my apartment, took a shower, then went to sleep in my comfy futon.

THE END

…until next year when the weather warms up again. Also in the future, once Beth gets here, we’re planning on doing longer trips together.

Previous Day (Day 9)

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