Day 33 — Obanazawa to Yamagata - Tom and Marilee Retire to the Road

October 5, 2025

Day 33 — Obanazawa to Yamagata

Marilee here.

We woke up prepared to have to pack up in a hurry as the forecast was for rain beginning in the morning. But for once the Japanese weather forecast seems to have been wrong — instead of rain the sun came out and we ended up having one of hottest days of the trip so far.

Warm sunshine while you’re sitting by your tent, overlooking a pleasant little lake and drinking coffee, doesn’t really inspire you to want to hustle around and jump on your bike. Especially when you know you’ve only got about 50k to go that day. So there was a certain amount of leisurely lounging going on, and there would have been more except for the fact that the small town general stores where we’d bought dinner fixings the day before didn’t have much in the way of breakfast foods. Our entire food stock consisted of two bananas that a nice grocery store lady had given us for free after she accidentally tore the stems off, and a bun filled with bean paste that Tom bought at the onsen. Having consumed these, we needed to get going and find some more food, further down the road.

Luckily, we never seem to be more than an hour’s ride from a convenience store. And sure enough we spotted one only a few kilometers away. So we had second breakfast in the parking lot of the 7-11: chocolate milk and pastries.

The first part of the morning we rode through farmland again. The rice harvest seems to be in full swing, every sunny day for the past week or so the fields have been full of tractors and we wake up each day to the faint smell of smoke from the smoldering fires in piles of rice hulls. Like Japanese cars, the farm equipment here is also small compared to North America— no fully enclosed air conditioned cabs on these tractors. They are designed to maneuver in small and often oddly shaped rice fields.

Now and then we would encounter one ahead of us on the road. They travel at almost the same speed as we do, so they are a challenge to pass on narrow road!

Before long we moved from farm to town to loooooong suburb. Endless in fact, merging town after town together in a long hot series of housing developments and strip malls, with traffic lights every few blocks. A “conurbation” — a new word for me, and one I hope not to have to use too often, because biking through one in steamy heat is a very sweaty business.

This is near the start, when it was still fairly rural and picturesque.

Convenience store emergency — I need a popsicle!

Stopping and starting at traffic lights for 20 kilometers is slow going, but there were no trucks on the road and the traffic was also proceeding at a stately pace, so it all had a bit of a relaxed, late summer weekend feel to it. This feeling was reinforced when we got to Yamagata and immediately encountered a big community funrun that was just ending, so we cycled along through crowds of people leaving and various celebratory barbeque parties starting.

When we checked into our hotel, the desk clerk told us they had nowhere for us to park the bikes at the hotel, but there was bike parking a couple of blocks away. So we unloaded all our bags and then set off to find the bike parking. Which turned out to be an enormous facility attached to the train station, where a helpful attendant guided us through the process of buying a parking ticket from the automated machine and then led us through the labyrinth of bikes to find an available spot to store them. When I oohed and aahed about the vast number of bikes, he told us that most of them belonged to high school and university students— so we guess that these are kids from outlying communities, taking the train into the city and then biking to school from the train station.

Obligatory dinner shot — soba noodles in broth and shrimp and vegetable tempura. Delicious!

Today's ride: 53 km (33 miles)
Total: 1,705 km (1,059 miles)

Rate this entry's writing	Heart	3
Comment on this entry	Comment	0