The Wild Piglet Ride!

I'm sure for those who are not familiar with what a wild piglet is, you are curious as to why I have a wild piglet much less ride it!  Well, never fear!  Its not an actual wild piglet!  Although...that could be fun!  Anyway, so my wild piglet is none other than Pete!  My scooter!  If you have heard of the movie "The Wild Hogs," with Tim Allen, that is where this comes from.  In that movie they ride the big Hog motorcycles.  Well, as much as Pete thinks he is a Wild Hog, it is quite obvious that he is not.  Thus the name....the Wild Piglet! 

Pete has the heart of a hog though and he showed it this week!  My friend Matt and I decided on Saturday night that we wanted to take a road trip.  We have been talking about this for a long time, but just haven't done it.  We had holiday on Monday and Tuesday so it worked out perfectly!  So Sunday morning, we rolled out on the Wild Piglets.  We decided to head up the east coast of Japan and see where we ended up.  We took one hiking back pack worth of clothes and set out.  There is a main highway that kind of winds up the coast, however we didn't take it most of the way up there.  We wanted to get the real experience!  We ventured off through little coastal Japanese towns and found some absolutely beautiful coastline!  We found a couple of light houses, and even climbed to the top of one of them.  The waves were crashing on the rocks and it was beautiful!  Late in the day it started to really cool down and get misty, which is not fun on a scooter!  We decided to call it good and find a hotel before it got dark!  So Matty pulled us through on Japanese and we found a small town that had one main hotel and that's where we stayed.  We had stopped at some other hotels, but they were a bit expensive and not really where we wanted to stay if we had a choice!  This hotel was fantastic!  We each were able to get our own rooms for 5900 yen each!  That is incredibly cheap!  Oh and that included Japanese style breakfast too! 

Sunday night we decided to check out the town.  Oh the towns name is Futaba.  Its a really great little town, but nothing was open!  Its a holiday week and most everything was closed.  Except the snack shops...and well... we didn't want a snack.  I won't go into what a snack shop is.  Anyway, we found this little mom and pop type bar/pub very close to our hotel.  Well this turned out to be a fantastic evening!  I might mention that it was quite obvious that people up this far don't see foreigners very often.  So we walk into the bar...and it hurt!  Ha ha.  I couldn't resist!  So we walk into the restaurant and bust out all the Japanese that we know...which for me took about 2 seconds.  They were so friendly and you could tell that all the people in there were buddies!  Two ladies ran the place and did all the cooking....amazing!  To make it short, we had some amazing food, some great cold Asahi and karaoke!  They wanted us to sing the Beatles.  It was so fun!!!  They sang their songs and we clapped along and we would go back and forth.  In the end one of the gentlemen that we had been talking to ended up paying for our entire bill!  We couldn't believe it and neither one of us felt like we could say thank you enough! 

On Monday we were ready to go out and see what we could find.  We went and just started exploring.  It was extremely fogging and hazy on Monday.  Which normally I would not like, but it turned out to be amazing.  Right now in Japan it is rice planting season.  Which means that the fields are full of water and all of the workers, either by hand or machine are planting rows and rows of rice.  It's absolutely fascinating to watch and see.  It's one of the most beautiful scenes to me!  Anyway, we drove through the rice fields and it was hazy and foggy.  I can't do it justice by description.  I tried to take some pictures, but they weren't turning out very well.  The feeling of being on these windy, hilly roads curving through these miles of rice fields with steam/fog coming up from the fields was surreal.  It is by far one of the coolest things I have done since being here.

So we stayed Monday night and were not ready to come back, but we kind of had to.  We headed back this morning, Tuesday.  The forecast had said that it was supposed to rain.  We were not looking forward to this.  Well, we got a great surprise!  It was clear blue skies and sunny all day!  We were both so happy and we enjoyed the ride back.  All together we logged 550 km on the trip (about 330 mi).  We had a blast and are ready to go again!  In my mind Pete is a hog to the core!  We didn't take that many pictures on the trip, but I will post what I did take.  Since it was so foggy we didn't take a lot because they didn't turn out. 

Anyway, that is the Wild Piglet ride!

Hope all is well where ever you are!

Sayonara for now!
Elaina