Marilee here.

Yikes what a day! We woke up even earlier than usual, expecting at least three challenges in the day ahead:

1. a lot of mileage to crank through to get to the city of Nikko, our goal for the day
2. Significant elevation gain over the day
3. Some rain  in the forecast for the afternoon.

We were a bit sad about leaving our campsite before the campground manager started for the day, as we’d spent much of the previous evening speculating about what he’d have to say to us when he showed up.

We’d rolled into the empty campground late-afternoon and set up our tent, then headed off for an Onsen bath and to get some groceries. When we returned a couple of hours later we found our path to our tent blocked by a very irritated man in a small white truck, who scolded us thoroughly for not having registered our site at the large administrative building at the far end of the adjacent municipal sports complex.

Our Japanese language skills don’t extend to explaining that we had no idea a building 400m away was connected to the campground, so Tom just dutifully went and filled out the requisite forms and paid up. He said it was a a little like being taken to the Vice Principal’s office. Once the campground manager decided we weren’t freeloaders he warmed up to us, and returned to our site to show us all the campground amenities, which included an amazing number of water taps, all of which, he assured us repeatedly, had potable water — and just to make sure we got it and didn’t accidentally expire of dehydration overnight, he would demonstrate this by slurping water from his cupped hands and rubbing his stomach with a delighted expression. He was a fun guy, as long as you weren’t trying to dodge fee paying!

However, once he left and it got dark we realized we’d set up our tent almost directly under a light pole. So we unpegged it and shuffled it into a darker corner of the campground — laughing about what our new friend’s reaction would be in the morning, and whether a whole additional set of forms might be needed.

We’ll never know, as we were on the road before 8am. Unfortunately we weren’t early enough to dodge the rain, which started hours ahead of the forecast. In general we’ve found Japanese weather forecasts to be very accurate, but the skies fooled the weatherman this time. So we found ourselves once again packing up a soaked tent and donning rain gear at the start of the day. But we weren’t too fussed about it, because the rain was supposed to be light and intermittent.

“Supposed to be” is a phrase we ended up using a lot over the course of the day. As in, “is this what they think light rain is supposed to be like?”, while we are getting absolutely hosed. It was a daylong soaking, a steady downpour. 

We were completely drenched within a couple of hours (there’s only so much even good rain gear can withstand). So by 10am, while standing under the shelter of a 711 porch, we booked ourselves an emergency hotel room for the night. And the prospect of a hot shower, dry clothes and a warm bed for the night did a lot to cheer us through the day.

We’ve often said to each other on this trip that there hasn’t yet been a day  that doesn’t include at least one section of beautiful scenery and great riding. And that was true of this day as well, with a long zoom along a twisting narrow road through mist-draped mountains. And the last bit into Nikko was through older onsen resort towns nestled in the river valley, which was interesting and scenic. Sadly we were too wet and chilled by that point to fully appreciate it, or to take any photos.

We stopped in a michi no Eki for lunch and put on an additional layer of (temporarily) dry clothes, which got us through the final 40k or so.

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The other use of “supposed to be” today was: “I thought there was supposed to be climbing?”. (This was not said out of any sense of disappointment, quite the opposite). Our Garmin was telling us we were going to have an elevation gain of more than 800m over the day, yet we were doing what seemed to be an awful lot of cruising downhill. We realized that it was having trouble factoring in the tunnels — if we’d had to climb over the mountains instead of shooting through them, this day would have been significantly harder. 

Instead, we rolled into Nikko by late afternoon, puddled up the hotel lobby as we checked in, and then revelled in the glorious dryness of our room. The next day would be a full day of sightseeing at the temples nearby. Nikko is just a couple of hours by train from Tokyo and there were many more foreign tourists in town than we’d seen for weeks. As fate would have it, we had gotten a hotel room within walking distance of the temple area, which had put an additional 7 grindy km — slightly uphill, slightly against the wind, and with the rain picking up — at the end of a long day, but which turned out to be lucky. 

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And the Garmin decided to delete the stats and map for the day. Oh well.  It ended up being 85 km with only 550m or so climbing.

Oh, and at some point during the day we passed 2000 km on this trip.