Bravo restaurant nutrition

My sleeping pad has another hole in it. Despite having to wake every few hours to inflate it, I slept okay, though my hip hurts where it was on the ground. Soon we will have to graduate to the hardcore foam pads that thru-hikers favour as they cannot be destroyed. My predictions of early dawn baseball games came true, when we got out of the tent at 630 there were a dozen games already in full swing nearby. A man motioned to us that we should probably get going soon, as they were setting up for a game. I waved back and gave a hands-together gesture, which he mirrored, which told me it was a friendly interaction. We leave our bikes propped up so I think people see the tent and the bikes and put two and two together.
We got away pretty quick and had breakfast at a conbini, I had some protein bread and jam, this time I got a squeeze bottle of jam that won't leak. Have to restock on snacks! We had smoothies and cans of coffee and were quite pleased to be on the road again. A group of baseball players were also hanging out at the conbini, seems like everyone likes to play baseball here.
We got up on the retaining dyke that runs parallel to the Edo river, where we had a great view of the river and all the sports fields below. We saw dozens of teams of baseball players, soccer, a bit of rugby, lots of golfers, the odd drone pilots, some rowers, runners, cyclists and walkers. Lots of folks out and about! We even could see Fuji way out in the distance, peeking from between two ranges. Such a big mountain.
We saw a cafe that had the trappings of a bikers oasis, and stopped there and had lemon and honey iced tea. While we were sitting, a cyclist stopped and chatted us up, then another stopped and also wanted to know about our journey, then a half dozen stopped and suddenly we were in the middle of a bunch of middle aged dudes all wanting to buy us honey toast and other stuff for our journey that they thought was both crazy and worth doing. We were asked many times where we were going today, I replied with "Nikko", which caused waves of incredulity. I guess these guys wouldn't be doing a lot of one way trips like us, or don't bike over 100km. We escaped from the horde eventually by plying everyone with stickers, and took off before anyone else could waylay us.
Around this point we really noticed the tailwind. A tailwind! We thought it was a myth. It turns out that yes, it is possible for the wind to be in your favour. Who would have thought! We welcomed the assistance and sped on as fast as we could manage in the mounting heat. Towards noon we came across a heart shaped lake that was some kind of flood retention system for Tokyo, and biked over the cute bridges that crossed the lake before stopping for lunch at a family restaurant.
I really struggled when we sat down, I felt like I ran out of blood in my brain. I think the toast was not enough calories to sustain me for the morning, I need to eat in the mid-morning like I used to. After a bit of food I perked up though, I had a nice miso ramen with gyoza and Bryce had a katsu bowl with egg and a side of soba. Very nice. We managed 65km before stopping for lunch, very respectable, but we decided to make good on our intention to hit up Nikko, I was going to need a bathtub somewhere to do my mat repair and we were interested in a theme park in Nikko as well. We braced ourselves for a challenging afternoon and set off.
It was very hot in the sun and our clothes began to get that frosted look from salt crystals forming on the outside. Bryce is convinced it makes our clothes more abrasive too. After an hour we had to stop for some icey treats as Bryce thought his head was going to melt in the heat. Nothing a few ice cream pops can't help. I had a mango ice bar as well, very tasty. We looked up hotels in Nikko and found ourselves between a rather basic looking wood-panel box kinda affair that would make for a 130km day, and the onsen hotels we were interested in. These would be a 150km day, which we thought might be possible with the tailwind, but we weren't sure. We decided to kick the can down the road and see how we felt in an hour.
After an hour or so we took a break to stretch and have a drink, I took off my helmet and rested it on my bike. This is when I discovered that a Japanese giant hornet was hanging out on my helmet and had no intention of leaving. My helmet has a honeycomb structure to the internal crash system, I think this might have attracted it as it seemed to be sitting on it. We spent a few minutes tossing rocks at my expensive bike trying to hit the helmet and get the hornet to leave, eventually Bryce found a length of cable on the ground and whacked the helmet a few times til the monster flew off. Good grief. The last thing I want in the middle of nowhere is a hornet sting, let alone a giant murder hornet sting. I've been bitten and stung by everything else out here I would like to pass on this please.
Taking the opportunity to get the hell out of Dodge, we rode to the next conbini to get some snacks to keep up our energy while we decided what to do. At this point it was feeling pretty clear that while 130km would be a challenge, it wasn't going to be that bad. 150km felt possible, but that it would wreck us for awhile afterwards. We decided against that plan and booked the pine box hotel. Now we had a destination, which felt better.
The next two hours were a gentle climb under towering trees over the highway into Nikko. We talked about what plans we would have to make to attempt to break Bryce's personal best at 160km. I figure we should get a pile of energy gels and eat one every 45 minutes and skip lunch altogether, eating on the road. We average 20km/h when we're moving, so get going early and we'll be done after 8 hours of riding. Add in 2 hours of stops and it's a typical 10 hour day that we usually do. We'll ride as much of a caffeine high as we can tolerate for the stimulants and have a couple litres of sports drink on us in my food trunk. We both felt that our limiting factor was not our legs, but how long our butts can tolerate the saddle. Maybe getting up when we have the gels and doing a butt massage? We definitely need to change riding pads halfway through the day, that will help with the chafing. I think we have the endurance, but we haven't really tried to plan out our nutrition and timing all that precisely.
While I think there's a possiblity for two chances for this, our best bet is undoubtedly northern Hokkaido. It's a gentle downhill for 200 km and we can find a segment to bookend with hotel rooms. If we start already packed and end somewhere already set up for us, we don't have to worry about anything but riding. That should do it. We need goals for this part of the trip, without them it'll get kinda boring.
We arrived at the "hotel" without problem, easily beating my personal best at 135km. Amazing! And I feel like I can still do more. We will for sure get Bryce's PB at this rate. The place we rented was a single unit of a rather clever hotel design, every room is essentially a small trailer home complete with a washer, a fridge and a hot plate. The interior is left as chipboard and you check in on a tablet by taking pictures of yourself. It gives you a code to unlock your door and voila you're inside. It's cheap as chips, we can fit our bikes inside no problem and the water pressure is fantastic. We love it. Nobody bothering us about tattoos and onsens, no fussing. Granted if there was a problem of any kind we'd be screwed as we can't call a number for assistance, but it worked fine this time.
We walked across the street for dinner, a place offering giant rice bowls piled high with meat. You had us at "giant". We both got monster bowls with a dozen pieces of char broiled pork belly, a shared order of karrage with chili sauce and two lemon sours to celebrate our highest point yet. Fantastic! We even figured out what the mysterious stone buildings we had seen around the town were. They looked oddly like mausoleums, but it seemed like half the properties had one of these rectangular stone buildings with a crest emblazoned on the side. Turns out they're just traditional japanese storehouses. They're sheds. So much for that mystery.
We ordered the perfect amount of food, which was probably about four servings each. Which honestly is still not enough, today's calorie count is 4500, which is a lot to make up. We'll probably need to eat big tomorrow to fully catch up because we didn't eat very big on the road. After dinner I went back to the hotel to work on my camping mat and Bryce went to go find some laundry detergent and dessert for us. The mat revealed it's secret hole quickly, in a similar spot as last time. I guess I over-inflated it and sat on it a bit too harshly in that spot and caused some tears where the internal structure is connected. Oops. Good thing we have lots of patches! I also noted that tomorrow it's supposed to rain cats and dogs all day. That sucks. Now we have to decide what we're gonna do. Maybe it'll change overnight, weather here is temperamental.
Hot baths in the surprisingly generous tub made up for our lack of onsen access and soothed our sore legs and backs as well as any sores we have going on. With luck we'll feel right as rain in the morning. Trying to get an early night tonight so we feel really good tomorrow!