The quest for coloured leaves brought us back to the Genbi Gorge, home of the flying dungo, though you'd have expected the weather to have stifled the dungo trade. We parked behind the Sahara Glass Park,and once again pretend to be paying customers before heading for the gorge, where the coloured leaves weren't quite at their best yet, but weren't too far off.
From there it was on to the station at Ichinoseki, farewell to Our Host, and on to a Shinkansen that took us as far as Morioka, where news of the soccer semifinal defeat didn't seem to have reached the platform. We made our way across to the right line for the Akita Shinkansen, and we're on the ground in Kakunodate on schedule in not quite pitch dark and drizzle just after five-fifteen.
Fortunately the hotel was located right next door to the station, the rain wasn't falling that heavily and the dash across open space was a mere cricket pitch or thereabouts.
Better, a quick investigation revealed a coin laundry, which solved a slight predicament. We'd been on the road for five days, and the laundry backup wasn't anywhere near the desperate stage, but with two nights in Kakunodate, a late arrival into Aomori on Tuesday and an evening appointment in Sendai on Wednesday, it made sense to get what we'd accumulated clean, and push the crisis point back another week or so.
Dinner at the hotel restaurant did a perfectly acceptable job of filling a yawning gap without threatening to hit any heights, and we treated to the room, free Wi Fi and a couple of healthy slugs out of the bottle of sake that had been donated to the keep them warm in the mountains campaign in Kitakami.
Needless to say there was no question of needing any rocking...