Kiso-Fukushima bike trip

I’m disappointed in my lack of writing production lately. I’ve been busy at school—while I used to have at least one entire class period of free time, lately it’s been used up with class prep so that I’ve only gotten one free period per week. Eventually I’d like to get to the point where I write regularly even if it is at home, but at the moment I’m still distracting myself too much to put time into that.

I had a long weekend, and while it wasn’t as productive or adventurous as I had hoped, it could have been worse too. There was a huge typhoon, apparently the strongest in sixty years, so it rained all day on Saturday. I had planned to do a bike trip, but people kept warning not to go outside in the typhoon so I stayed home all day. Then it also rained on Monday too, and since that was forecast, I changed my plan to a one-day bike trip. I went to Kiso-Fukushima, which I had been to before, about 43 km away, so about 90 km round trip. It took me 2 hours 45 minutes to come back, which I did with minimal resting. I stopped in Naraijuku to buy some souvenirs, and in Kiso-Fukushima I went to the supermarket to browse, so altogether the trip was about 7.5 hours.

Kiso-Fukushima is a really beautiful town that reminds me of Markarth, my favorite city in Skyrim. It is closely hemmed in by mountains and is very hilly, but also has several bridges going over streams. Overall, it was a great trip, with the worst part being a 2 km tunnel just after Narai with a narrow footpath. Aside from that, there was very little difficulty or danger. My only dissatisfaction was that I had to come back the same way I went.

I thought as I was biking that perhaps the main deterrent from my making these trips was because I have tried to sleep four times in my hammock and have not succeeded once in sleeping more than four hours. The prospect of physically exhausting myself only to set up camp and have a sleepless night is hardly appealing, so maybe traveling without the intent to camp will motivate me more. Granted, then I’ll have to pay for accommodation, but biking will save nearly half the cost of travel in addition to providing a reason for the travel.

However, this revelation may have come too late. There’s only one more long weekend left this year (I think), and I really want to use it to go to Nagoya. Biking to Nagoya would probably take two full days, and I’d like to have more time than that. January and February are really cold, but if I get a nice weekend without snow then maybe I can bike somewhere. Most likely though, if I want to take a decent trip, I’m going to have to wait until the end of my contract.

In other news, I bought a game yesterday that was a lot of fun called Streets of Rogue. I spent too much time playing it and ended up not getting my hair cut. I’m also still playing an idle game. I think I’m probably too excited about the both of them to commit to going climbing this evening as I had planned. But I’m also still really sore, so maybe that works as an excuse.