Ambling around

On Saturday I went for a ride with some friends of my wife's, the first time I've been riding with more than two others. It was quite neat to see a string of ten bikes in front of me all going around the corners one by one. Great weather too.
We went out to the east coast of Chiba which has a decent beach, which is not crowded, yay! Our friends were camping there but we decided to come back that evening since we needed to do a bit of shopping the next day (and I wanted to ogle my new bike).
The trip took us about 3 hours each way since we got lost a bit, and stopped often. We probably covered 300km overall I think, which doesn't sound like much in NZ maybe but with the heavy traffic and squillions of traffic lights here it makes for a very tiring day.
We took the highways and I had to pay for them all. I didn't really feel comfortable doing my 'ignore the toll booth' trick with all the others there since they had a habit of waiting on the other side of the toll booth for everyone to get through and regroup... ok yeah I wussed out. So like a typical road trip in Japan, I ended up paying more for road tolls than for gas. I think I spent $22 on gas, and $26 on road fees. Incidentally thats $8.20 in petrol tax. Why can't these fuckers use that money to build roads...