Noto Bike Trip: Day 3

Day 3 dawned overcast, but quickly changed to sunlight.  This was probably the most active and exciting of the three days of the trip, though it had the second-lowest mileage.  Day 3 featured numerous interesting tourist spots that we mostly discovered on the road (as opposed to having any knowledge of them beforehand).

Jungle campsite

First we found the special Shiroyone Senmaida rice paddies.  Seeing the signs talking about it up ahead, we felt some skepticism, given that we have, for instance, three rice paddies visible from our back porch. These ones, however, proved to be rather spectacular.

 Nice coastline before the rice paddies

 Impressively terraced rice paddies

 We walked down amongst them for better views

 It was a planting day, but only the biggest of the terraced paddies could be planted by machine

Just to prove that we were there

Next we encountered a salt-making shop along the side of the road, and wandered in to test their wares.  They handed us salt-boiled potato slices when we walked in to the shop, which tasted amazing, as did everything we ate starting around the middle of the second afternoon.  We tasted samples of their various salt grades, purchased a bag of the kind we liked best for later, and then, yielding to temptation, bought a cone of the purple-sweet-potato-flavored ice cream sprinkled with fresh salt.  It tasted both like purple sweet potato and like salt, and was pretty good.

 Tasty taters

 Surprisingly tasty potato ice cream

 They like taking pictures of tourists behind their banner

Salt shop

Another interesting aspect of day 3 was that it featured the trip's sole flat tire, on the rear tire of my bike.  The steering felt a little shaky and squirrely going down a big hill at speed, so at the bottom we pulled over and I checked my tires, discovering that my rear tire was quite soft.  I pulled it off the bike, inspected it for punctures (didn't see anything at all noteworthy) and decided to reinflate it and try to go to the next town rather than trying to fix it in some dude's driveway.  In the next town we asked to see if there was a bike shop nearby, as while I had a patch kit with me I'd never even seen a patch put on before and wanted to get back on the road sooner rather than later (didn't necessarily trust that my patch would hold for another 150 miles, either).  The guy at the grocery store (we were there buying water) directed us to the service station across the way, who told us there was a bike shop two miles down a road that went not-where-we-were-trying-to-go.  I was trying to ask them if they knew for sure that it was open, prior to heading down there, but when they called the guy he told them he'd just come fix my bike in their parking lot and save us the trip.  Sure enough, he drove up, pulled my wheel off, and spent a significant time doing a very through job of patching the hole in the tube (he didn't find what caused it either, we were both kind of confused about that) using a collection of patches and chemicals that looked to be older than me, and therefore probably incredibly toxic, and therefore probably incredibly effective.  Charged me a whopping $20 for driving to my location and spending at least half an hour patching the hell out of my tire - that seemed more than fair to me.  Also tuned up Ana's rail derailleur (fidgety transmission widget I didn't want to mess with on the road) which had taken to missing shifts on the second day for a further $10, which we considered an excellent investment.  All in all, I have to say that we found the folks up on the Noto to be very helpful and friendly, doubly impressive considering that we probably smelled like.

Not good

 Did not bring gloves for dirty work

 The bicycle repair brigade swooped in and very thoroughly repaired my tire

After spending so much time not making any progress, we were starting to feel some pressure to make some miles in order to reach our goal for the day.  In an excellent act of goal-thwartage, the town of Otani had a tremendous Boy's Day Festival (Wikipedia reference) going on and we stopped, took pictures, and bought very reasonably priced snacks from the vendors, before heading onwards.

 The symbol for Boy's Day is carp - because they persevere upstream or something

 No shortage of carp banners - the most I've seen in one place

Grilled chicken skewers for cheap

We made good progress on the relatively flat coastal roads, and saw a lot of pretty dramatic ocean and harbor scenes.  We stopped for lunch at another salt-making place and had homemade soba noodles in broth (amazing...again).

Lunch place on the side of the road - was overrun by a tour bus when we arrived

 Had coals in the middle of the table to warm your hands

 I've no idea what the vegetables were, but it was all tasty - broth had some seaweed in it for some proper coastal flavor

As the afternoon started getting late, we began encountering very significant hills, with switchbacks.  These took some getting up, and while the views were great they slowed us down further and burned a lot of our available energy.  The hills were on the outskirts of the town of Rokkosaki, which has a famous lighthouse, and is renowned as sort of the "real" tip of the peninsula even though it has a pretty wide top with some points further out.  When we reached the town, we knew we were going to have trouble making our goal for the day, and dashed up the hill to get pictures of the lighthouse before getting back on the road, by now having rounded the peninsula and heading south on the eastern side towards Suzu, beyond which was our goal, a specific restaurant renowned for serving home-grown emu and home-brewed beer.

 This was the point when we swore in unison

 View from the other end of the picture above

 Not such an impressive lighthouse for the trouble

The terrain remained hilly, and we made solid rather than speedy progress.  When we got to Suzu, we needed a boost, and stopped at a store where we discovered a candy bar named Almond Rush that we concluded upon tasting was probably nature's most perfect food.  We also got a honk and a wave from an employee at the place we'd eaten lunch at, who apparently lived in the area.

 Yes, it tasted that good

 Possibly nature's most perfect food (Bourbon is the brand, not an ingredient)

 Rather spectacular helmet hair to go with the candy bar

We, powered by Almond Rush, powered into the darkness in search of our emu restaurant.  Being behind schedule from the adventures of the day, it actually started getting quite dark on us, and we fastened our headlamps to our helmets to supplement the headlights on our bikes.  I put my headlight facing backwards and set it to flash so as to increase our odds of surviving to eat dinner.  We had to dig deep into the reserves to keep going for the miles past Suzu (the roads in the area were so curved that our estimated distance to travel turned out to be most of ten miles shorter than it actually was, which was disheartening) but we were in no case going to stop before finding our goal, which by this time had taken on mythic proportions in our mind as a kind of post-biking Valhalla, and we persevered, following the numerous but not-necessarily helpful signs leading to it.  We arrived after 8pm and were very glad indeed to find out for sure that they were open.  We staggered inside and started ordering everything in sight.  Will you pretend to be surprised when we tell you the food was amazing?  Intellectually, I would probably tell you in retrospect that it was decent, perhaps verging on good, but at the time every calorie was nectarous wonderment and I even liked their beer.  Stuffed, satisfied, warmed, and mildly buzzed, we walked the bikes out of their parking lot and onto a grassy field about 200 feet up the road, where we robotically set up camp and fell asleep instantly.

 I just thought this picture was totally awesome

 We'd planned to be there, say, two hours before this

 Very pleased to be there and to have beer

 The place is called the Nihonkai Club, and the crane represents the fine and frothy foam on their beer or something like that

The meaty bits here are smoked emu, and they clocked in at basically halfway between chicken and beef and were not bad at all.  They also sold deep fried emu, which was even better, and cheaper.