Sunday June 12th - our last rest day of this trip ahead of five riding days into Sapporo this coming Friday.

A very restful day, actually, with the greatest excitement just before 7 p.m. at dinner in a restaurant when everybody's cell phones sounded an earthquake warning. Sure enough, a minute or two later, the ground shook for maybe a minute. It was a 6.2 quake off-shore. From the reaction of the local people around us, this is part of normal life and within a minute, everything was back to normal.

The morning had started with the buffet breakfast at the hotel where we found more than the usual variety of juices just before the omelette station.

We felt obliged to see how well it went with the corn flakes.

Interesting things around town in no particular sequence - the fish market a few hundred metres away from our hotel..

Pillar boxes...


Manhole covers...

The Moomoo taxi and its immaculate driver with matching tie...


The waterfront with its renovated warehouses from Hakodate's days as one of the first ports to open to foreign trade in the 19th century.

The warehouses house various shops and eateries, catering largely to tourism including cruise ships.


Teddy bear museum in one of the warehouses...


...and bicycles...

Further along the dock, Ursula poses with the statue of Joseph Hardy Neesima who in the 19th century defied a ban on foreign travel using his small boat at night to reach a merchant vessel in the harbour, got a foreign education, and on his return to Japan, founded the Doshisha English School (now University).


Eateries...

There are a few 'Lucky Pierrot' hamburger places in Hakedate with different themes. The previous night we were at one where the theme was Christmas - there we (along with Catharine, another Canadian on the trip) were in June in Japan eating in a room full of Christmas trees and related adornments and listening to non-stop Christmas music in English.


And nearby the California Baby Coffee Shop. With apologies to our American friends, we joked that the small print beneath California Baby might not attract many Europeans or even Canadians.


Tonight was at Genghis Khan's lamb barbecue restaurant. Good lamb but I still haven't figured out how to take sizeable lamb sirloin off the grill and elegantly eat it using chopsticks alone. My mother would not have approved of how I did it.


Tomorrow we start the last series of rides into Sapporo and the end of this memorable journey.



































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