Day 10 - To Kanazawa - wild tailwind all the way

Btw - I am fine!  I know I am behind in this blog!  but there's stuff that has to be done!  then at night I crash and in the morning its on the road again...  but stay tuned, they will come in dribs and drabs!

Sat morning I woke up at 3am and thought... geez I had better check if there's anywhere to stay in Kanazawa.  I found K's House - a hostel and there was a private room left, so booked straight away.  then of course I had to plan a route to get there - Plan C was in play!
by the time that was done, it was time to get up...  decided that I would find breakfast along the way as Apa had already more of my money than I had planned, so I wasn't going to pay another 1300Y for their breakfast...

there will be not photos of this day, because either my camera, the memory card or my card reader had a conniption and so my computer thought there was something that needed fixing and completely wiped all the photos....  I mean what?????  Update!!  I found that some of first photos had been downloaded before the conniption!  see below!

it wasn't that picturesque sort of day, so I was cranky, but it could have been a whole lot worse!  so glad I download my photos every day!

so I chose a route that would be pretty boring, but just plain old cycling along...  well, things in Japan are never plain old boring...  I still love seeing the weird signs on shops - amazed at the throbbing sounds that come out of the huge Pachinko buildings (massive pokie machine places - car parks huge and on a Saturday morning were already fast filling up) and generally love seeing the mix of shops and rice fields and the flowers and vegies growing in almost any vacant plot of land.  Heaps more solar farms again.  in 2011 I don't remember seeing any, then in 2015 I saw several tucked away in small corners of rice fields.  But now there were huge banks of solar panels regularly.

I was looking forward to stopping by Lake Kiba - but its not a stopping place at all - but I rode down the side road and found a little alley in the grass to get down to the concrete border of the lake.  guess its flood mitigation.

but ever northwards and that blustery tail wind stayed from behind and just kept getting stronger.  right into Kanazawa and turning down a little one-way alley I found K's Guest house and it was perfect!

Later on in the evening I jumped on a bus and after a bit of stuffing around I managed to track down ex-work colleague, Phil and his wonderful wife Carol and we had a proper Japanese meal in a perfect Japanese house...  a tad weird to be chatting away in English!