Biking to Shishigahana Park
Saturday, May 24, 2014
Two weekends ago Jonathan and I biked to Shishigahana Park in northern Iwata.
On the way there we stopped to eat the lunches we bought at a konbini earlier.
My sandwiches weren't very good (ham and cheese and egg with mayo), but the Cheeza crackers and sparkling lemon water (my favorite drink right now) were great.
I saw a really unusual looking cat. It looked like its head and body weren't part of the same cat. The head was black and shorter fur but the rest of the body was a reddish brown with longish fur.
We briefly stopped at Shikiji Station so that I could buy a drink from the vending machine. It's a post office and station in one building, but it's more post office than station. Jonathan said that the restroom had stuffed animals in it.
Most of the bike ride was nice until the end when we had to go up a steep hill since the park is at the top of a hill. We couldn't ride our bikes and had to push them. Even that was hard so Jonathan ended up pushing both of our bikes. But eventually we made it to the top!
The restroom by the parking lot was very interesting, haha.
We hiked a very short trail to reach the main lookout area.
We went on that bridge later.
The views from the lookout area were really pretty!
We hiked on a trail and came across some playground equipment.
That's the lookout area where we were earlier.
We hiked down most of the trail, which, according to the signs, led to a parking lot. It's too bad we hadn't just parked our bikes there instead of taking them up the hill.
We stopped for a few minutes to eat some snacks. These coated peanuts were good.
There was a shrine that wasn't impressive at all, but at least there had been cute fox statues leading up to it.
We then had to go back down the hill. Jonathan rode his bike down parts of it, but it was too steep and scary for me so I just walked my bike down the hill. I should have just left my bike in the woods on the side of the road somewhere at the bottom to begin with. I hated taking it down the hill because it was kind of dragging me down the hill with it.
Along the way down, there was a small unmarked path leading into a bamboo forest. We went in there for a few minutes. We would have liked to explore more but we weren't sure if we were trespassing or not. We probably were.
Those fish flags were outside of a kindergarten that we passed. The crosswalk button between there and an elementary school was super cute.
That's the bridge going back into Hamamatsu. It has a really nice, wide pedestrian/bike path. Luckily the wind was calm then. It had been pretty strong when we crossed the bridge earlier in the day.
I was pretty worn out after all that biking and hiking. We biked about 24.5 miles (almost 40 km) and hiked a bit on top of that. I thought that I would have been less tired after building up some strength biking a lot the previous weekend but I guess it didn't work that way.
Then we went to Hamazushi near my apartment. It's a sushi restaurant very similar to Kappa Sushi were Lauren and I went. The food seemed about the same to me, but I loved that they had several different types of soy sauces. My favorite was the yuzu one. So because of that I liked Hamazushi even better. But Kappa Sushi has the shinkansen that brings special orders to your table which is cute. So I still want to go there again sometime.
I had hanami dango (the kind with three colors) for the first time. It had red bean paste inside and tasted pretty much how I expected. So it was good, but for dessert I'd pretty much always prefer something chocolatey.