Mountain Climbing in Toyokawa

Alright. So. I drank so much yesterday that I couldn't do Air Alert (shitty jumping exercises), so I did that this morning. Then I rode my bike 20 miles and climbed a mountain. This is my story.

So Alex had it planned out that today would be what he likes to call an Adventure Day. Basically we left home on our bikes and biked towards these mountains that were way off in the distance, and didn't stop except to visit his host mom in the hospital. We basically just trucked it for 10 miles until there wasn't a road anymore, then we climbed. We climbed through this forest with a dried up stream bed, and it was really beautiful, and there was this old decomposed vehicle of some kind too:



We finally reached the top of that mountain, which was a construction site on the mountain we had originally intended to climb. I think they were turning it into some sort of residential area, kinda sucks that they need to destroy a mountain to do that.


We tried to go to the very top, but some construction workers told us we couldn't, even when we told them we work for a magazine (we don't) they said that today wasn't good and to come back another day. Anyways, the top of the mountain, even though it wasn't the very top, was still really high up, so we took some killer pictures.





Then we climbed to the top of the mini-mountain in the photo above, and we reached a small shrine in the middle of the woods, which we took as a proverbial sign that we had reached the end.


So we climbed back down, stopping briefly to carve our names into a tree and got back to our bikes. Now this is the part where I'm and idiot. I don't know how much you know about Japanese bike locks, but they are basically part of the bike, and then there's this metal piece you can pull out to stop the wheel from moving. Well, the little metal piece must have fallen out of my pocket at some point during the climb, because it wasn't there when we got back. Oh Fuck. First I tried to pick the lock with tweezers and a toothpick from Alex's swiss army knife, then Alex just beat the shit out of it with a rock until it finally broke. It was actually sort of cool, overcoming adversity like that, except for the fact that the lock broke. I hope it's fixable/replaceable.

From there it was a ridiculously long bike ride home during which we sort of got lost, but then we asked for directions and this lady guided us to a station Alex knew. Then we took an extra long way to go to a liquor store to reward ourselves. I bought the requisite 6-pack of Yebisu Black as well as a can of every beer I've never had before. It looked something like this:


It was at the register of the liquor store that I realized I was yet again out of money. Fuck that.