September 25, 2025
Day 23 — Aomori to Owani
Marilee here.
The plan today had been to ride from Aomori to Lake Towada, another ancient caldera lake with a resort, but closer investigation revealed that:
- It required 1700m of climbing
- It was going to rain all day
- There was a strong wind from the southeast (guess which direction we needed to go).
So plans got revised and we settled on a closer destination with less climbing, and booked ourselves some indoor shelter for the evening, leaving the big push to the lake for the following day. An advantage to this rerouting was that it would take us by an archaeological site we wanted to check out.
We lingered a bit in Aomori’s covered shopping streets before setting out, window shopping and waiting for the rain to ease off. Always something interesting to look at.
It was well after mid-morning by the time we got underway, and then the navigation apps led us out of the city on a charming tour of suburban backstreets, where we got to surprise people washing their cars and talking to their neighbors. One or two confusing detours later and we found ourselves at the Sannai-Maruyama archaeological museum, along with a giant school group of excited kids. The museum is on the site of an ancient village that was inhabited from 3,900 BC to 2000 BC. The site includes reconstructed pit houses that you can go into, and displays of the excavations — and in fact seems to be still being actively excavated.
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It was all very fascinating and the museum had tons of artifacts that had been unearthed at the site — pottery, jewelry, toys, tools etc — all of it so unimaginably old. We spent a good two hours wandering through it but then realized that after all we had 50k still to ride and we’d better get cracking.
Our route took us through rice fields and more suburbs, and then dived into the woods on a road so overgrown that it had effectively become a bike path. It climbed up and down through dense woods and we followed it for at least an hour without a single car appearing.
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Towards the end of the day we came to a town with a restored samurai-era shopping area that we wanted to check out. We found it (we think), but all the shops were closed— which is probably for the best.
Finally we arrived at the little hotel we’d booked for the evening, where we engaged in a little Fawlty Towers style comedy of errors with the older lady at reception. She spoke even less English than we do Japanese, and kept trying to use google translate on her tablet to talk to us. Except she had it set for English to Japanese, so when she spoke in Japanese to it, nothing happened. And when we tried to explain by talking to the tablet she got even more flustered. Eventually she ran off and returned with a grouchy looking younger woman who had clearly just been roused from a nap. With the help of these extra reinforcements we eventually caught on that we needed to pay them an additional 300 yen (3 dollars cdn) for the use of the in-house onsen. OK! Sorry for causing a half hour of frustration! Many bows later and we collapsed in our room.
This was the first Japanese-style inn we have stayed in on the trip, and it had clearly seen better days. Later that evening in the izakaya around the corner we chatted to a fellow guest (Japanese, but fluent enough in English that we caused no serious misunderstandings — we think) who told us that he’d last been to this little hot spring town when he was ten and it hadn’t changed a bit. As he was probably our age, that’s a long time without much change, but based on the hotel we believe it.
Dinner, by the way, was delicious.
Today's ride: 60 km (37 miles)
Total: 1,105 km (686 miles)
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2 months ago