Now it’s time to talk about our life and adventures “beyond” Japan.   About a year ago some of our favorite biking buddies invited us to join them on a bike tour of Corsica in September 2014.  Since we had no plans that far out and were thinking about doing another bike trip somewhere anyway, we said sure.

So for the past several weeks – in addition to everything you’ve read about here – we’ve been working on getting ready for this big trip.  The biggest challenge has been how to get there from here with our tandem.  We’ll be traveling on planes, trains and buses and our tandem case seems to be either too big or too heavy.  We considered shipping it over, mailing it over, and carrying it over.  But every time we asked about it we’d get a different answer.  One day it’s “sure, no problem.  Next time it’s “no, we can’t take that.”

We leave tomorrow, Wednesday, Sept. 3.  We’ll take the high speed Shin Iwakuni to Hiroshima, get off, wait 6 minutes and get on the next train to Shin Osaka.  We get off that train, go downstairs and get on another train to the Kansai Airport.  From there we can walk to our hotel where we spend the night and then walk across the street to the airport for a morning flight to France and then on to Corsica.

The tandem has not been out of it’s case since we packed it up after the Northwest Tandem Rally in Pendleton, Oregon over the 4th of July weekend.  I’ve not been on a bike since then.  Chris has done about four really hard rides in the past few weeks with his new biking buddies.  So we are the most unprepared for a bike trip as we’ve ever been.  We just plan to poke along and get there when we get there.

The riding should be beautiful as well as very strenuous.  We’re looking forward to seeing our friends and getting into some nice fresh sea air.  I’ll try to keep you posted along the way.

For all you biking buddies out there, here’s a link to the route and terrain we’ll be covering.

https://c1g1haynes.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/tour-de-corse-document-de-voyage.pdf

PS – Update on Tandem:  We just learned about “Black Cat” a great service that will take our bike from Iwakuni to the Kansai Airport where we’ll pick it up Wednesday morning and check it with our luggage.  YEA!