September 15, 2025
Day 13 — Shintosakawa to Sapporo
Marilee here.
We knew today was going to be a long day of riding. We were pushing to get back to Sapporo where we had a hotel booked and we were both looking forward to sleeping in a real bed after 9 nights of camping. But there were many kms between us and the big city.
We were a bit sad to leave such a lovely campsite. The valley below us was full of fog when we woke up, which gradually cleared as we had breakfast and packed up, with the hills across the valley slowly poking up out of the mist.
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Tom had plotted a route on backroads for most of the day, to keep us off the highway and away from the traffic heading into the city. The morning was great: swooping through wooded hillsides and down into valleys, threading our way among rice fields. There was a scent of smoke in the air, and we noticed that many of the farms had smoldering piles of something that after a lot of discussion and speculation we guessed to be rice husks.
We took a late morning break outside a heritage building that had been turned into a museum/art gallery devoted to the work of a local artist. And somehow after that break, the day that had started out so wonderfully became … less wonderful.
Our old friend the Hokkaido headwind woke up and made himself known, and the backroads route went awry, leading us up onto a high dike, where the pavement soon gave way to loose gravel and the wind became so strong it threatened to topple us over entirely. We had to carry on with this pathway for a few kilometers as there was no easy way off the dike. Komoot is either a hero or a goat it seems.
A glider swooped down and landed in a nearby field at one point, which was pretty cool. And eventually we found a way back to the road, and pretty much stuck to a zigzagging route of secondary roads for most of the way to Sapporo. It wasn’t without its frustrations— we had multiple rivers to cross and had to find routes with bike friendly bridges, which entailed a certain amount of backtracking. And all the time there was the energy-sapping headwind and heat to deal with.
But eventually we were cruising along on a riverside bike path that led us right into downtown Sapporo, past tennis players and picnickers and baseball practices, right to our hotel. We were so done in though we didn’t think to pause to take photos.
At the hotel we exploded a torrent of damp stinky gear all across our little room. And after showers, and putting the worst of the stinky gear into the laundry, we headed right back to the Curry King for more of the soup curry that we’d been dreaming about ever since we left Sapporo.
Today's ride: 90 km (56 miles)
Total: 667 km (414 miles)
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