Today overall was much better than expected. Left a bit later than normal after a breakfast of ‘bread’ and coffee.

Cycled for a bit stopped at Aeon a massive supermarket in a mall. Had lunch outside in the car park. Released that we hadn’t come very far and that it was 11:30.

Cycling through the town wasn’t as bad as we thought it would be and the rest of the days cycling was pretty good on quite roads. Stopped at another supermarket for dinner food soup with noodles and vegetables. The 3 climbs were okay as well.

Cycled through a few fields with what looked like hedges growing in them. Google told us it was tea. They have fans above them to circulate the air and stop the frost looks pretty weird.

This campsite is pretty good. The main building is closed on Monday but you can register online and the toilet is still open.

There is a shelter with fire places this is where we cooked dinner and had a fire which sort of worked bug got quite smoky luckily noone else is here but there does seem to be another tent. This campsite is free as well. I don’t really understand why campsites in Japan. Are free but good for us.

This campsite is really close to Shibushi Oil Stockpile Site. More info on Wikipedia but it holds lots of oil and forms part of Japan oil reserve.

We woke up after a lot of rain in the night luckily the tents were still waterproof.

Started the day by moving all our stuff down to a large covered shelter as we thought it might rain. It was good to lay everything out. And have coffee and bread with peanut butter for breakfast, along with a pot noodle, well a bit fancier than that, but in essence it was a pot noodle.

There seemed to be a lot of staff walking around the campsite, and one of them came to talk to us. I think he said that it was okay for us to be there and that it opened at 9 o’clock it was hard to work out what opened at 9 as the campsite was closed, he said that two.

Finally we got slowly moving, the day started with a very steep descent, through a bamboo forest.

Cycling was through a mixture of fairly busy roads and some lovely rural routes. The route planning that Cliff did paid off well, and cycling following the route on GPS made it a lot easier than having to check a map regularly.

We stopped off at Kintaikyo Bridge
錦帯橋 which was very impressive one of the top three bridges in Japan. It looked lovely with all the cherry blossom 🌸 🌸🌸🌸

We stopped for lunch outside a supermarket. We went a bit crazy and got quite a bit of food.

The weather was good, apart from a head wind. We stopped at a post office to buy a few stamps, for the previous referred to postcards.

We made good progress to Tokuyama, where Cliff dad met us again at the Route Inn Tokuyama Ekimae Hotel
ホテルルートイン徳山駅前

We spend a bit of time in the hotel room laying out our wet things including tents. Then we put the air con on hot to dry everything. This seemed to work. We had a shower before heading out for a lovely meal with Cliff’s Dad and his uncle and family. We had a lot of food which was very tasty in a small pub type restaurant

Nishimura
にしむら

We got to bed a bit later than we would have wanted to but not that late. Have to get up very early for the ⛴️ ferry tomorrow.

We made it to China

All going well just waiting for the flight to Tokyo now.

I had to remove a few things when varnishing the boat so I tried to take a lot of photos to remember what I had done. 

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We have decided to sell our campervan, more details are available on the following page of the website More Info

My CD player stopped working- it basically didn’t seem to realise there was a CD in it. I decided to replace the optical pickup. I followed these instructions: 

You Tube video

Good photos here

Lots more information here

The old optical pickup was a philips VAM1201/11 I got this replacement, Ebay VAM1202 it seems to be a straight swap. I got a replacement unit that had all the wires to the two motors already soldered on as I wasn’t sure I would have been able to manage that!  

So far it is all working fine playing Yo La Tengo. The only problem I have is that the CD tray does not open unless there is a CD in there. I am not sure why- I think it might be the magnets that hold the CD in place might be slightly stronger in the new optical pickup. 

This was my first go at an all grain brew,

The process I followed was mash the grain in the cool box at about 65°c for an hour.

Then I batch sparged them with water at about 75°c.

Following this it was time for the boil for an hour with various hop addition. The results and ingredients will be posted to this page Beer when I have bottled it. 

There is a bit of scum and it tastes a lot of onion. I should have tried making it without the onion.

I am going to leave it a bit longer before I put it in the jars. When it goes into the jars this will stop the fermentation process.