The trip to Hokkaido

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The trip to Hokkaido Sunday June 22

I've already uploaded the pictures, but I have yet to put comments on them. For those of you who don't know, I just completed a 5-day cycling tour in Hokkaido with some coworkers. 5 days, 715 kilometers (that's 444 miles for those of you who don't speak metric), and over 7,500 meters of vertical climb.

Yeah, I'm not going to lie. It was hard. But truth be told, it wasn't as hard as I imagined it may be.

I first bought my road bike on March 2nd, and I set out on Day 1 of the journey on June 1st. 90 days isn't particularly long -- I am slightly amazed at what the mind and body can do in a reasonably short amount of time when one sets one's mind towards a particular goal. Jon was joking that when I first started in March, a day's ride of 70 kilometers seemed like a big deal. Now, that's a nice healthy ride, but nothing I couldn't easily handle. Heck, I do 22-25 a day when I go back and forth between work.

Observation number 2: Hokkaido is much, much larger than I had originally imagined. Certainly, in context of the US, Japan itself is small, but when you deal with Japan, Japanese roads/traffic, and mountains, you start feeling like something 100 miles away is very, very distant-- because it isn't easy to get there.

Originally, I had thought we'd be going all the way around Hokkaido. "All the way around must be something like 500 miles," I thought. Wrong-- we did a big loop that encircled only about one-fifth of the size of the entire island.

This only means one thing I suppose: I need to go back and do a different tour!