Great sleep on the sheltered trampoline and off to an early start on a cloudy day.

Goodbye to another park camping spot.

A slight climb to the first of a few beautifully preserved villages on the Nakasendo trail. In the name of heritage, they’d made the effort to rid these villages of the otherwise ubiquitous utility cables. So nice not to have wires in every photo – of which I took far too many. Being so early we had plenty of space to have a good potter around the main streets and some temples.

Onions hanging to dry

Footpath getting a bit tight for bikes, but great deserted tunnel for echoes.

Not minding the early signs of autumn yet, with the cloud a lot of the day was under 20°C – drizzle was a small price to pay.

Lunch in Agematsu was a good way to get out of the rain for a bit. We happened across a restaurant run by the cutest elderly couple, assisted by their son. They were very interested in our trip, we explained as best we could.

From this restaurant, we started to include “elderly couple” in our searches online for restaurants – such places always seem to serve food made with utmost care.

I’m unsure what I’m trying to explain, with my very limited Japanese, but Rachel has captured the moment well.

Down the valley for thirty kilometres we continued, the towns spacing out a bit more for slightly faster progress.

Hydro plant.

Mischievous macaques on an abandoned building – the first we’d seen.

A brick building!

Along with the waterwheels we’d seen earlier, we happened upon a man making more in his garage. Interesting to stop and look for a bit – no structural nails and his working model was intricate.

Rain cleared by now and brightening up.

After this town, Tsumago, the Nakasendo climbed 400 m over a hill away from the river. Bit too steep for us, so we took the road to the same point.

Just as well we did, as the where the trail emerged back to the road, at the top, it was rather busy with walkers.

Down into Gifu, as we attempted to get through the metropolitan line, the following day, that’s almost continuous from Nagoya along the south coast.

One more lovely town on the Nakasendo for the day. Would have been nice to stay up here, but we couldn’t find anywhere suitable to do so.

So we lost five hundred metres rapidly and had a short ride to a business hotel onsen in Nakatsugawa to end an unusually climby day (for this trip). Excellent day of sights it was too; unfortunately Rachel was starting to show signs of having caught the illness that had plagued me in Tokyo.