By Thortek Outdoors
While I had always been interested in the outdoors, it wasn’t until around eight years ago that I really understood its positive, transformative power. At that time, I had been living in Japan as an English teacher when a friend of mine came to visit my home in a medium sized town called Beppu in the southern island of Kyushu. My friend Matt who was also a teacher, had found himself placed in Hokkaido, the northernmost part of the country a few years earlier and I remember sitting there in awe as he talked to me about his many adventures in the remote region where he lived. After arriving, he just got a bicycle and began to ride whenever he could for both the exercise and the freedom. What he told me next was even more amazing. After his final year, he geared up and rode his bicycle down from the very north of Japan down the west coast, around the southernmost tip of Kyushu and then up the east coast until finally he reached Osaka before flying home. As he told me about his 3000 Kilometer adventure by bicycle, I remember entertaining for the first time in my life that if I chose to do so, I could do the same. I said goodbye to my long-time friend after a few days visiting with him, and I must have had a grin on my face with all of the new ideas I had floating in my mind. Something had changed inside of me and I knew that I would never be the same again.
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