The Four Points Tour Mk2: Four Points RETURNS!

…or Rebooted, or Reloaded, or Re-energized. Or some other REhash permutation that Yahtzee may have touched on here. Whatever we’re calling it, the Four Points Tour is back and going strong. If you were keeping up last year, you may have heard my mad blather about wanting to drag Mark and Lindsay around Hokkaido on a road trip meant to circumnavigate the island. Fortunately, I’ve still got a map kicking around:

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That’s about 2,200km of coastal road. It was madness last year when we planned to do it in the nine days of vacation we managed to rangle out of the Japanese National Holiday known as Silver Week. Unfortunately, the car I was meant to be getting from my predecessor in Furubira turned out to be a junker, and we were forced to scrap the Four Points Tour along with the car, resorting to the far-more-modest, rental-car-enabled Substantial Yet Notably Diminished (Due to Logistical Concerns of Space and Time) Two Point Five Points Tour of Fun.

She was a good roadtrip, taking us to previously-unexplored corners of the island like Onuma, Hakodate, Wakkanai, Rishiri, and Tomamae. However, the promise of what could have been lingered in Mark, Lindsay, and I like a hungry void (okay, so maybe it only lingered in me like a hungry void).
It wanted adventure, space, and the open road.
It wanted to explore the far-flung corners of our new home.
It wanted ridiculously spicy, volcano-ring chips and delicious Seicomart fried chicken.

Now, with Silver Week once again approaching, and with the open road around this island lying before us, more pregnant with possibility than any strip of asphalt has the right to be, The Four Points Tour has been REBORN! Watch this space for more information on how we intend to bring this island to its knees with the mother of all road trips!

Or, you know, something a little less highfalutin’.