Due to so much happening during Day 7, I’m going to split this up into two entries.

Day 7, Part 1
Tadami, Fukushima – ???

Distance: ~11 km
Average: n/a
Max: n/a
Total Distance: ~547 km (the distance on the map below is a typo and I don’t currently have Photoshop installed to fix it)

Today I once again woke up bright and early and had camp packed up before the clock hit 5:00 am. I rode about two kilometers down a local road to get back to the main road. At the intersection there was a nice little park with a picnic table under a gazebo, which seemed to be an excellent place to eat breakfast.

I got off my bike, set up my stove, and proceeded to start cooking my morning bowl of oatmeal. I had gotten used to adding rasins to my oatmeal to add some more flavor to it, so once the oatmeal was up and cooking I detached my handlebar bag and unzipped it to grab the package of rasins from the other snacks I keep in there. After setting it on the table, I reached over and opened the top to find…

Ants. Hundreds of ants crawling around everywhere inside. Ants crawling up and ants crawling down and ants crawling out and ants ants ants.

I jumped back, surprised and disgusted and disheartened. My snacks!

Luckily, all of my snacks were in factory-sealed plastic, so I quickly realized I had no worries about them infiltrating my cache of food. Getting back into the swing of things, I shook all of the food out on to the table, along with a bunch of ants. I then proceeded to slam the upside down bag on the table over and over and over to get all of the ants out of all of the crevices. Overall it was a successful endeavor, but I did end up finding an ant or two still wandering around inside for the duration of my trip, even finding one a few days later when I eventually arrived home.

As this was occuring, it dawned on me why they had found their way in. The previous day I had opened up some Ritz cracker sandwich things and hadn’t been able to finish all of them, so I wrapped up the remaining two in the wrapper and placed it back in my bag. I presume that overnight, while my bike was on the ground in the forest, ants had been drawn to the two Ritz cracker sandwiches in my bag, infiltrated the zipper, and had a free-for-all all night long.

In the end they didn’t hurt anything except for the two cracker sandwiches and some of my sanity, so it’s all good.

After all of that, I went back to my oatmeal, threw the rasins in, and waited for the oatmeal to cool down. While eating for my food to come down to an acceptable temperature, I noticed that I wasn’t just sitting near a dam–I was actually sitting between two dams. That’s right, the river had been dammed twice within only about 1.5 kilometers. With that on my mind, it started. And by “it” I mean the rain.

At this time it wasn’t too terribly bad, but then the “second it” happened, one which was far, far was.

The sirens sounded.

Do you remember those signs from Day 6 that said that if the sirens sound it means that the water will be rushing through shortly and you better get to higher ground? Yeah, it was those sirens that started sounding. Hearing the sirens, remembering the signs from yesterday, and with the realization that I was sitting between two large dams, I quite understandably quickly became quite worried.

Did one of the dams break? Have they gotton too much rain lately and the dams are going to overflow? How safe am I? Where should I go and what should I do?

I ended up chosing what I considered to best the easiest choice: I stayed put. I was comforted that the only other guy there, who was sitting in his semi in the parking area, didn’t really seem to pay it any mind. There also hand’t been any earthquakes recently and the rain wasn’t too terribly bad (yet), so I was hoping that the sirens were going off for some reason other than impending doom.

And luckily for me, after a few minutes of me freaking out inside, they turned off.

Whoo.

Unluckily for me, the rain picked up. Let’s have a look at some comparison photos.

This was a photo I happened to take from my gazebo before the rain started

This is what the same view looked like during the rain

Now imagine that that rain went on like that for eight hours. Yes, I sat under that gazebo waiting for eight hours for the rain to stop. Within that time I ate two meals, studied a bunch of kanji, emailed Chet and Beth on my cell, and checked the weather numerous times on my cell.

I had received weather confirmation back from both Beth and Chet letting me know that the rain was supposed to let up around 3:00 pm then start back up at about 6:00 or 7:00. That gave me about a three to four hour window to complete the 60 km ride to Nagaoka, the nearest city. As long as I took a minimal amount of breaks, I figured that would be possible.

Getting to Nagaoka was also very important because due to all of the rain and colder-than-expected weather my fears of getting hypothermia while caught in the rain or during the always-getting-colder nights greatly increased. I had to get to Nagaoka to purchase some more gear and possibly find a warm place to stay for the night. I had to get there.

The rain let up earlier than I had expected, suddenly stopping at about 1:00. Knowing that I had to make the best of the time I had, I quickly set out. I didn’t even get half a kilometer before the rain started pouring down again, leading to my quick backtracking to the safety of the gazebo shelter. Damn.

About an hour and a half later it let up again. This time was much closer to the time that had been forecast so I again booked it out of there. It didn’t take long for me to realize that this ride was going to have much more climbing than I expected, so I leaned down and got into it.

The last of what you could call a town took only a few minutes to disappear through the trees as I went higher and higher into the mountains. About seven kilometers outside of town I happened to come across one of the seemingly most useless train stations I’ve seen.

If you’re reading this off of LiveJournal, click to see the map

There you see Tagokura Station, a station that is sitting in the middle of a forest on the side of a mountain with closest building I had noticed being a good six kilometers down curvy mountain road I had just road up. From glancing at the schedule, I saw that it receives six trains a day–three in one direction and three in the other. About the only reason I could think of for its existence would be because they felt like building a station at the small free space between the two long tunnels through the mountains.

While still pondering about the station, I kept on plodding up and up the mountains. It started to sprinkle, and I kept going, hoping that the rain wouldn’t get too strong.

Up and up and up through nothing but mountains and forest.

Then the chain on my bike snapped.

I had been pumping along, suddenly lost all resistance, then looked down to see that where my chain should be, there was only air.

I had no spare.

Fuck.

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