All bike trips end early

I try to rationalize it - to appease the voice in my head whispering "failure... failure..." - by citing some obvious reasons that I, after only 530km, would have boarded a bus today at 6pm to take me those last 170 km home.

My bike bag broke, making it more difficult to carry all the things I didn't need to bring in the first place - culminating in the loss of my water and some of my food somewhere between Suwa and Fujimi. I got lost before the Suwa mountain crossing causing my to loose a valuable hour. Combined with my late start, it almost assured that it would be impossible to make it to where I had to be in order to make it home one time tomorrow (not to mention the time lost trying to cope with the broken bike bag). Even if everything had gone according to plan, the plan was a bad one - requiring me to take the Koushyukaido 200+ kilometers from Suwa to Shinjyuku. While in the city is actually not that bad, relatively speaking, there is no joy spending ten hours riding on this narrow, car-crowded road in mountainous areas with no "prize" - i.e. an onesen or glorious downhill ride - awaiting me at the end.

But then, as the bus pulled into Shinjyuku terminal, I felt something strange... comfort or relief. Could it be that I actually missed Tokyo? As I looked out the bus widow, I saw the overcrowded streets as I only do when returning from the much more civilized countryside. People, people, and more people. Some happy, some bored, some overworked, some in a hurry, some not, but all of them... all of them seemed to fit in to their environment.

Maybe I was OK with returning to this city I love to hate because - having spent a week traveling through places in Japan where interaction (facilitated by a bike with bulging bags and a big bald foreigner) comes much more easily. Perhaps the increased interaction leads to understanding and means that I am that much more equipped to observe the people in their environment with the same wonder as I did the insects and plant life I saw in the various ecosystems along the way.

Maybe it's a yin/yang balance thing... too much time in either place and I need more time in the other. So is Tokyo yin or yang?

Then again, maybe it was just because I couldn't wait to see Tomoe and the birds.

One thing I do know however, is that I am ready to go back out tomorrow next week.