Marilee here. 

Kids, the moral of today’s story is “waste not, want not”. 

Dedicated readers of this blog will no doubt remember vividly our story from early September of transporting our bikes from Sapporo to Wakkanai, the spot in northern Hokkaido where we started our north-to-south odyssey. But for new readers, (or those of you who haven’t been paying proper attention — you know who you are!), here’s a quick highlights reel:

• We had decided to travel by train from Sapporo to Wakkanai, which meant that our bikes needed to be encased in “rinko bags” (essentially big drawstring bags required by Japan Rail, to prevent dirt or grease from bikes from befouling their train cars).

• On the morning of our journey we biked to the station, spent an hour attempting to cram our bikes into the rinko bags to the amusement of the station administration staff, then dragged them up to the platform, only to discover with less than five minutes before our departure time that we were standing on the wrong platform. 
• Wild sprints through the train station ensued, dragging huge duffel bags of all our possessions and the bikes, already half-falling out of the damn rinko bags. 
• We made the train, but we swore that never again would we go through the hassle of trying to take bikes on trains in Japan.

Fast forward to today, three months and change later: we kept our vow to stay off the trains with the bikes (although we were sorely tempted one very rainy day in Shikoku), but just in case, I had been carrying around the neatly folded rinko bags in the bottom of one of my panniers the whole time. And now the just in case day had arrived.

Our plan to build bike boxes out of the TV boxes that our hotel had saved for us, while theoretically a genius idea (thanks, it was my idea, she said, blushing modestly), proved in execution to be less-genius. In fact, impossible. The idea was to slice off one side of each box and put two boxes together to form one box deep enough to contain a bike. But our only means of attaching the two boxes was cheap dollar store packing tape, and after a hour or more of our best attempts at box construction, the result was saggy, fragile and clearly not strong enough to hold a bike. 

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It was already mid-afternoon, and panic was setting in. We abandoned the genius box idea and switched to Plan B: bagging the bikes and crossing our fingers that the airline would accept them, and that they survived the flight undamaged. With one bike already in pieces, Tom raced off to a hardware store for more supplies, while I stayed and guarded the mess we’d created in the hotel’s back alley.

And this is where the rinko bags came in, and finally proved their worth. We sheathed the bikes in bubble wrap, inserted them into the rinko bags (which fit much better with the bikes more completely disassembled, fenders removed, etc), and then gift-wrapped the whole shebang in giant sheets of thick plastic decorated with duct tape. 

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The hotel staff nicely allowed us to store these eccentric packages in their fancy lobby overnight, and never asked us why we didn’t use the boxes they’d saved for us. 

With the bikes taken care (we hoped!), there was just enough time left to jump into a taxi and race to the central post office before closing time, to mail off a big box of all our camping gear to Taiwan, where the parents of our daughter’s friend had kindly agreed to store it for us until we arrive there in late February. We don’t anticipate camping in Thailand or Malaysia, and thanks to them, we won’t have to drag our down sleeping bags across two (hot!) countries.

By the end of the day, we were drained from these efforts. We stumbled out for dinner and ended up by chance at a raucous izakaya, the kind where the staff yells a chorus of greetings every time someone enters or leaves (or in this establishment, also when you go to the bathroom). We sat at the counter and were fed sashimi and delicious mystery fried things, and talked about all the things we’d miss about Japan. It has been a truly wonderful three months. I hope the next adventure in Thailand is just as good!