Final stretch

Before we cover the last leg we need to complete an addendum to the last post. It was written, as mentioned, in a coffee shop in Beppu whilst waiting to check into our accomodation. After the completion,  we struck up conversation with the shop owner, Mickey. After almost 2 hours of talking we ended up planning to meet up with her and some of her friends who had dinner plans that night. What a great experience! We joined them at a Japanese BBQ place where you use a grill in your table to cook. We shared all kinds of foods we would have never ordered but are quite common like intestine and liver. The best part by far was just spending the evening with a group of people we would have never met at a local restaurant. We have a picture of the group we took afterwards that we will include below.

The next morning we woke up to complete the last leg of our biking journey. We left Beppu by ferry and entered the same port we left Shikoku on at Yawatahama. The purpose of going back to Shikoku was to reach the Shimanami Kaido, a group of bridges with bike only lanes to reach Honshu. Our first day from the ferry we stayed in Futami at a cute campsite overlooking a beach that provided a great sunset. We headed out the next morning and stopped for lunch to walk around Matsuyama. We went into the impressive castle and had a great lunch in town.  We stopped 18km before the bridges to stay with Taka, our second warm shower host. He was on odd man with clear pack rack tendencies but he was welcoming and our beds were very comfortable.

We reached Shimanami Kaido early the next morning and spent the day picking through the bridges and islands they connected. We had perfect weather for our last day beside the sea. It was pretty impressive to have these massive bridges that were actually a highway with separate on and off ramps and lanes for bikers only. We camped on the second last island called Inno-Shima at another closed but beautiful campsite right on the sea with our own beach. 

Today we finished our last push towards Hiroshima with a stop in Takehara, a small town with a preserved historical section which apparently used to be a village for samurai to live. One of the reasons we wanted to stop there was because of a large sake brewery called Fujii Shuzo which we checked out, sampled and purchased a bottle.  We had marked a campsite about 30km from Hiroshima for our last night but when we arrived it was obviously closed and was washed out by a nearby river. We ended up cycling up to a neighbouring shop where we explained our situation to the woman working there. She offered to let us set up our tent next to the workshop and even gave us instant noodles and a coffee.  So now we have our tent set up on the driveway and are about the cook dinner on our last planned camping night in Japan. Tomorrow we will bike into Hiroshima and track down some boxes to ship our bikes home. We have a lot of feelings tonight, besides the fact that we are randomly sleeping in a factory yard,  about the last almost 6 weeks crossing this amazing country by bicycle. Many reflections and thoughts have been discussed back and forth all day. It will take some time for it to all sink in and we are sure getting to Hiroshima tomorrow will be a little emotional.