10/10 - Day 6

 Saturday, 10/10

Today is a travel day. We leave Kyoto and take the bullet train and transfer to another train, and.finally take a cab to our meeting place for the bike tour.

We had a couple of hours before we check out of the hotel and walk over to the train station. I started writing some random thoughts that could best be described as pop anthropology. Since I didn't finish them, I will dedicate a separate blog post to them when I finish them.

We did our usual routine: breakfast amidst a mob of French tourists, packing, checking out, and walking over to the train station. As usual, the station was mobbed. 

Once you put your tickets through the card reader, you couldn't leave to go to the mall and re-enter the station. So we looked for a place to hang out. 

Here's what the tickets looked like. We didn't use this one. There are enough numbers to figure out which train it is for.

There was no place to sit and wait and it was too early to wait at the track, so we found a spot that had a sign that said: "no eating or drinking" and sat across from it. Typical Americans.

The train was again on a bullet train and the trip only took about 20 minutes.

I didn't reset the speedometer on my phone to zero so the total time and mileage includes both trips on the bullet train, but the max happened on this leg. Pretty impressive. Especially since the ride is quiet and smooth.

The ticket above was for a local train that we could have taken after getting off the bullet train, but we would still need to take a cab to the hotel, so we decided to skip the transfer and just get a cab. That way, we didn't have to wait for the second train and it wasn't much more expensive. Thanks for the cab ride, Mike.

This was the interior of the cab.

We all tried to chat but about the only thing that crossed the language barrier was Shohei Ohtani (superstar baseball player for the LA Dodgers).

Here's a shot from our hotel. Thanks to Walter for photoshopping a smokestake out of the picture.

We met our guides but we needed lunch, so Romain took us to a traditional sushi restaurant. We were in rural Japan now, so we needed him to translate.

Most of the menu was raw fish sushi, so Mike and I ended up with shrimp tempura. There was a lot of oil to eat before riding a bike.

Here is my bike: Giant Contend AR, gravel setup.

Because Great Explorations is a small tour group compared with VBT, they have a small fleet of hybrids, but no road bikes. They rent bikes from a bike shop which saves them a little wrenching since the bike shop does the maintenance.

Since there were no other participants, we skipped the welcome meeting and went for the warm up ride. 

We rode out to a castle and walked around. Romain is the lead guide. He rode out with us and served as a guide at the castle too.

Like most castles, it was on a hill and surrounded by stone walls.

We were allowed to enter the main building at the top and climb the interior staircase. Here's what it looked like at the top.

Here is one of the pictures from the ride back.

Here are the stats for the day.

https://www.strava.com/activities/20533463616 

The hotel is a resort and had an onsite onsen or public bath. It's not really public because you have to be a hotel guest to get in. Walter and I convinced Mike to try it. It wasn't the best exanple of an onsen, but kudos to Mike for trying it. What would have made it better is water that was a little hotter and no kids.

To use an onsen, you leave your shoes at the door and go into a locker room where you strip down. You can then go into the room with the bath (basically a small pool with hot water), surrounded by individual spots to clean up. There are hand-held showers and stools where you can sit. Once you're cleaned up, you can get into the bath and soak. After a day of travel and a short bike ride, it felt great.

Dinner was at a high-end "Italian" place. 

There were some beautifully presented dishes like this antipasto plate.

And this piece of fish.

And this fruit and sorbet dessert.

There was some miscommunication about food and while they knew I was lactose intolerant, they did not get that I was plant-based. I might not have told them, but Walter said there was something in our application form and I don't think I would have missed it. Anyway, there was a little horse trading at dinner and there will be more at future meals.