We’ve just pulled out of a string of national holidays titled “Golden Week,” though “week” is a bit of a stretch. This is my second Golden Week in Japan, and I’m still not sure exactly how many holidays there are or the rationale behind assigning actual days off during the week.
It goes something like this:
April 29 used to be Green Day, but has been changed to Showa Day to commemorate the ruling period of the Showa Emperor (which happens to include World War II and my birth, among other important events).
May 3 is Constitution Memorial Day, in remembrance of the constitution that we made them sign 60 years ago and that officially made the Showa Emperor a figurehead.
May 4 was called People’s Holiday, but is now Green Day. Go figure.
May 5 is Children’s Day.
Some businesses are nice and give employees one or two whole weeks off. Public schools are nowhere near that, they go by the letter of the law. So we got a random Tuesday (April 29) and the following Monday and Tuesday (May 5 and 6). When I lived here a few years ago, the school gave us Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday in one of the weeks. That was very stupid.
In any case, when you lump together a bunch of national holidays in a nation where people don’t take Saturdays off, it is inevitable that highways, trains, and planes will be jammed, hotels will be booked solid for a hundred miles around any major tourist attraction, and the prices will be jacked up to match.
Not fun when you suddenly find out that one of your guys is pitching in Hiroshima on the first day of said stack o’ holidays. No tourists there, of course. And I didn’t have to stand up next to an anxious smoker and a redhead with Tourette’s for the entire 3 and a half hour train ride there, either.
I’ve never been smashed into the back of a truck with 20 other people on a treacherous, week-long road to freedom, but it’s easier to imagine now.
Before the Hiroshima disaster, I had a Tuesday off. I awoke with no plans other than to jump on my bicycle and go somewhere. There are some steep mountains behind a beachside town where three English teaching acquaintances live, and I decided to sneak around the backside and barrel down in hopes that the back way had an easier climb.
I was right about the ascent, but the trip was much longer than I anticipated. I found the right roads and wound through tiny mountain communities and pine forests until I got to the end of one numbered road and the beginning of another.
The first road had signs counting down to 0 kilometers, so I thought that I would be in the beachside town by then. I was still looking up a hill when I got to zero, and the new numbered road had a sign in the distance that said “2.4 kilometers.”
That’s what I had hoped, anyway. It was indeed 24 and that was another hour-plus that I hadn’t counted on.
I made it home OK and didn’t ride again until yesterday, my first Sunday ride in weeks due to baseball travels and Golden Week. Everyone showed up and was in fine spirits except the Bike Shops. Mrs. Bike Shop’s mother had been taken to the hospital the night before and the two were concerned and decided not to ride.
We wished Grandma Bike Shop the best and rode off to the Big Snake Tree. Larry had seen an article in the paper about a special wisteria tree that only blooms for a couple of weeks each year. It was in full color at the base of a mountainside campground and we wanted to see it.
I had never been out without the Bike Shops before, and the tone was a lot different. Larry insisted that I ride in the middle of the group and not the back, which put a lot of pressure on me to pedal harder than I wanted to at the beginning of the ride. I usually plan on having enough energy left to get back home.
A vicious crosswind hampered us all the way up the Monobe River, and the guys joked about how much wind I blocked for them. I told them to say their prayers when they try to catch me on my new bike in the future. I like these opportunities to cut up and have a little fun in Japanese.
We turned off the main highway onto the exact same road that I had taken alone on Showa Day. I chuckled and told the other riders, and that got me a turn in the front. Me and my big mouth.
We got to the Big Snake Tree, which wasn’t spectacular, but wasn’t bad. It was a nice little spot with a rushing river thanks to the rain the day before. I had whizzed through there without a second thought just two weeks before, and I’m sure that I would’ve remembered the tree if it had been in bloom.
From there, we passed the 24 kilometers sign and battled tourist traffic all the way out of the valley, over the pass, and down the mountain. Quite a few times we whipped around corners to find two cars at an impasse, and we actually had to scream out at one driver to stop before he drove his car off the side of the cliff!
The final plunge into the coastal town resembled a big snake more than did the wisteria tree, and moist weather and cover of trees had aided the growth of moss on the road. One of our riders went down very hard around a hairpin turn and luckily came up with just a deep scrape on one leg.
Carefully, we continued, and a few more riders slipped and fell, but each subsequent slide was funnier than the last because we knew they were coming and were taking it very slowly. Nobody else hit the pavement, but a retired veterinarian with a huge face nearly wiped out a small shrine sandwiched between the road and the face of the mountain and let out a hilarious scream in so doing.
We gathered at the junction of Kochi’s PCH and took our last break before we would all start to take our own routes home. I leaned over to ask Pretty Guy what his odometer said and was shocked to learn that we had already eclipsed 65 miles. All told, we rode 80 miles to see a tree.
What surprised me even more was that I had done this by myself beforehand and didn’t know how far it was. Or how dangerous. Thank God that it was dry and that tree was sleeping when I went out the first time. I would not have handled the cars and the mossy downhill roads as well without my friends in KCTC.
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