The rain and the fact that the onsen was so nice delayed my arrival in Aomori, the northernmost major city on Honshu. As a result, I missed the ferry to the opposite coast - which I'd decided to take in order to save time and avoid what looked to be (and I later found out was indeed) a dull major highway. By asking at the station, I found there was another ferry further up the coast that would leave in the early morning, so I cycled up to that port, battling an increasingly stiff wind and watching the whitecaps on the water over the breakwater to my right, and got a guy at the train station to recommend a minshuku right next to the port - they'll do that for you if it's a boring enough town. This picture was taken from the ferry the next day. Although it may not look like it, this is another wish fulfilled: I'd always wanted to see the famous Tsugaru Straits, of song, poem and legend. Even though it was the height of summer, in the suddenly stormy weather it seemed just as cold, desolate and wintry as I'd always imagined it would be. That night I went to sleep listening to the sound of waves crashing on the breakwater and the wind howling and battering the walls of my room . . . For me, definitely the high point of the entire trip.

All the way to the other coast, the sky remained gray, gray, gray and the sea a slightly more bluish gray with occasional dots of land like this. Though they appear to be connected, these are actually two separate islands.