The holding pattern continued. We woke up, packed the tent, and headed into MacDonald’s to steal electricity and eat breakfast.

This trip has been about riding, seeing Japan and importantly sharing those experiences through these daily posts. Never having before kept a diary, it has been an interesting experience to reflect back on each day and find a narrative within theoccurrences . It also takes a lot of time. Everyday either Christophe or I spends an hour typing up the post, gathering photos onto the computer, sorting through the ones we want, and uploading it all online. Add to that the time it takes to add the map point and update the trip data. I am not complaining, as a member of a generation obsessed with recording everything electronically I am happy to have this amazing record of these experiences, I am simply pointing out that it takes a lot of time. Often we put off these tasks and then find ourselves faced with a mountain of blog updating that can take the better part of an afternoon (see our 4 hour stint atMacDonald’s yesterday). With all this blogging to be done, my emails have been piling up. The immediately pressing ones (contact with people we are meeting, credit card issues) I reply to, but the general well wishes andcorrespondences have been falling by the wayside. This morning I decided it was time to tackle them all and catch back up.

Three and a half hours later, we left MacDonald’s.

By now it was 12:30, so we decided to head for a park golf course on our map, looking for food on the way. Park golf, by the way, is kind of like mini golf on steroids. The ball and club are bigger, the distances to the hole longer, and take out all the plastic animals and windmills. On the way we stopped at a 100yen ($1) kaiten-sushi (conveyor belt sushi) joint. Considering each of the dishes were only a dollar it was pretty darn good. Plus Christophe and I are both currently reading “The Sushi Economy” (we ran out of books so we are sharing the last one) by Sasha Issenberg, which has left us both seriously craving raw fish on rice.

After a delicious feast of sushi (totally only $12) we headed on to the park golf course. Sadly, when we arrived it turned out to be a real golf course (stupid map written in Japanese) so we putzed around a local mall, picked up some snacks for the ferry tomorrow, and headed back to our stomping ground by the river.

We grabbed showers at an internet cafe – well a manga kissaten, which has internet, video games, comic books, pool tables, darts, free drinks… as Christophe put it, a really dorky version of a sports club where you pay in 15 minutes blocks. Then we went back into theMacDonald’s (lord knows what that staff must think of Americans now), ordered up a shake each and plugged in to watch a couple episodes of Next Generation while we waited for it to get dark.

It was another dinner of cup noodle, this time accompanied with ume-shu (a sweet, plum wine), down by the river. Then we set up the tent, crawled inside, and fell peacefully to sleep.