I guess it was two days ago I was talking to my friend Keith about holiday plans, when he invited me to go to Matsushima with him and some other kids. The plan was to leave at about 3:45 AM that night on bike to see the sunrise on the beach. It sounded like a reasonably fun adventure, and I’ve heard a lot of great things about Matsushima, so I said I’d go. I woke up at noon that day, so I figured I’d just stay up until it was time to leave, but in retrospect, it would have been better to get some sleep.

The downward spiral:

Around midnight, Keith called and told me that we’d be leaving around 2:45 instead, because Kurnia (a friend of ours from Indonesia) would be coming with us. Mind you, Kurnia had just learned to ride a bicycle about a month before. We leave the dorms on time, and everything looked good for the first half-hour or so.

We missed the turn onto the road we had planned on taking for the majority of the journey, but Keith said he was pretty sure he knew a more scenic alternate path, and we had planned for a little bit of padding time-wise. We decide to take a chance.

Around 4:00, we get pulled over by the police. We passed them while they were driving the opposite direction, and they had slowed to a stop, but we just rode past them, thinking they were just letting us by (the road was very narrow). They turned around and caught up with us about 200 meters later, and it was a little interesting trying to explain why four foreigners are up at four in the morning biking to another city in the freezing weather, but we got by. Again I was surprised at how much communication could take place between us and the native Japanese-speakers, and it answered my question about how polite the police are. (It turns out that they use the informal when speaking to us.) They asked for our foreigner and bike registrations, and took down all of our information. About 30 minutes later, they let us go; we never had the impression that we were in trouble and they were really friendly.

The getting lost continues and Kurnia can’t keep up, so we each take turns biking with her behind the others.

Around 7:00 Keith finally realizes where we are, and that we’re about 6 km from where we wanted to be, but seeing as it’s freezing and the sunrise is starting, we watch from the docks.

<div style=”text-align:center;width:194px;font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:83%”><div style=”height:194px;background:url(http://picasaweb.google.com/f/img/transparent_album_background.gif) no-repeat left”></div><div style=”color:#4D4D4D;font-weight:bold;text-decoration:none;”>松島</div><div style=”color:#808080”></div></div>

We ate at a McDonalds (one of the only places open), and got warm. The ride back took about 3 hours, putting us at about 7 hours of being on a bike. I feel bad that Kurnia had such trouble keeping up, but it also would have been nice to be able to go at a regular pace.

All in all, a bit of a Christmas Eve day adventure.