Two trips to Sagae. Both times direct to a client's site. But the routes assembled for me by the Maps app on my iPhone differed considerably depending on my starting point. The route starting from home directed me to take the road up to Kawanishi which I'm quite familiar with since I used it when I visiting a client up on the road towards Niigata. The other one, starting from the Yonezawa McDonald's where I had stopped to grab a quick breakfast, was a totally different creature in terms of the route it picked to get to Nagai. In the screenshot below, it's the one on the left.
The route on the left goes through lots of rice paddies, not a heck of a lot of housing, and then through short stretches of woods and over and next to some rivers. The one on the right is on Route 287 as it skirts the bases of hills and runs in more or less the same heading as the JR East Yonesaka Line up to Kawanishi. The two routes meet up a short distance south of Nagai.
As one drives north of Nagai the road runs close to or alongside the Mogami River as it flows northwards through a valley. It's not spectacular scenery but it's a nice contrast to Route 13 which runs through a flat terrain cluttered with light industry, strip malls, and residential zones up until Nanyo, at which point it climbs into the hills for a while before dropping back into a wide flat basin dominated by Yamagata city.
