Well, here I am in Hiroshima. Betsy and I have had an interesting few days.We arrived into Akita on time and decided what to write on our hitch hiking board. It took us awhile to get out of Akita and then no one would take us onto the express way. We were waiting in a little town called Kitakami and it had started to rain. This guy pulls up and says he'll take us to Sendai. Sweet!! So he then asks us where are we going and we say that we are actually heading to Shimane. Then follows a long stream of Japanese which boils down to he will take us home with him and then take us to Nagano the following morning as he has a meeting there. We couldn't beleive our luck, especially since Wednesday night turned out to be cold and wet.
Mr Oikawa then drove us into Sendai,handed us his car keys and went to a meeting! When he came back he took us to a restaurant to sample the Sendai speciality, cow tongue, then we all wnet home to sleep! Mr Oikawa's meeting was at 8am on Thursday, April 2nd and it is a 6 hour drive from Sendai, so we got up at 2am and set out. It turned out to be an awesome day of hitch hiking, we got as far south as Kobe and decided to break out the tent and camp at a parking area.We had had a few issues with getting onto to the expressway and didn't want to leave. Unfortunately we froze our butts off, there was a ground frost. And we thought that we had left this kind of weather behind. We slept late on Friday morning to let the sun warm up the tent and to thaw ourselves out. We once again hit the road and arrived in our goal town, matsue on friday afternoon, April 3rd.