先週なんとなく国道367号線と国道162号線のゼンセンを乗るのは面白いかもと思いました。 普通はサイクリングすろと国道を抜きたいですが、今回ワザトこの国道の全線を乗る。京都市内の五条烏丸で始まる国道367号線を乗って北へ。 そして、日本海の近くの福井県三方で始まる国道162号線で南へ。 結局225キロをゆったり走りました。京都市周辺以外には道は良かった。車は少なかった。

Last week I got it into my head to do a “theme” bicycle ride: ride the length of National Routes 367 and 162. The total of both is about 183km (114mi), but with the transition between and bits before and after, the ride (see at Strava) ended up being 225km (140mi).

Both routes have endpoints in Kyoto, and many fun rides include parts of them, but in most cases the national routes are used begrudgingly as a quick way to get to the fun part of the ride. The ride is fun despite the parts on the national route, which with traffic and tunnels, generally fall into the “less fun” category.

So, I thought it'd be something (what I'm not exactly sure) to face this head on and make them the point of the ride.

For reference, here they are on the map:

I went to the base of the purple route and took it north, then continued to the top of the green route, by which I then returned to Kyoto.

Here's the view on Strava:

Within the city the idea of a “National Route” is merely notational, and it shifts streets a few times before it settles on the actual stretch of blacktop that heads north into the mountains. There are only three such turns on the entire length of road, and all are within the first little bit, but I managed to screw even that up and managed to get off course in the first 10 minutes. Sigh.

But, I quickly recovered and that was the last navigational mistake of the day, thank goodness.

Soon I was out of the city...

The weather forecast for Kyoto had a 0% chance of rain, but upon exiting a long tunnel an hour and a half in, at the highest elevation I'd reach all day, I was reminded that I was no longer in Kyoto... it was cold, windy, and rainy.

It rained on and off for much of the day until I got back to Kyoto.

An hour and a half into Route 367 I came to the turnoff to the Kuta region. I'd just been here on the ride mentioned in the previous point, as the fork between fast and safe, where I'd opted away from the national route in the increasing darkness. No worries about that today.

Rough calculations told me that I'd make it home by daylight if I could maintain a 20kph pace (12½mph), including all stops. (I left at about 7:30am; sunset was about 5:30pm).

That's an easy pace to maintain on all but the few steepest sections of these big modern roads, but the devil is in the “including all stops” detail. It's amazing how much time you can lose pausing for traffic lights, traffic, taking photos, buying a drink, eating, or just to catch your breath, much less to mechanical issues like flat tires. So it was comforting to compare the hours ticking off the clock, to the kilometers ticking up on the readout, and realize that I was keeping comfortably within range.

(My cycling computer, a Garmin 820, has a “virtual partner” feature where it can ostensibly tell you how far ahead or behind a certain pace you are, but it was ridiculously incorrect — “2 minutes behind” instead of “35 minutes ahead”, for example. Perhaps somehow its functionality changes if you're navigating a route? Sigh, I may have to actually hunt down the manual.)

I'd never been farther north than this village, so I was happy to see new road. I was greeted with a 130m (430') climb, then a descent toward the end of the road...

After finishing National Route 367, I had to continue away from Kyoto another hour's ride farther north toward the start of National Route 162, and as I started that leg, I made a shocking discovery: the gear shifters on my bike was almost out of battery!

My bike has Shimano Di2 electric derailleurs, powered by a battery that I have to charge a few times a year. The previous night I'd checked and found it had 29% battery left, enough to last a month. At the start this morning, though, the readout said 20%, so I started to worry that the readout wasn't trustworthy, but it remained at 20% halfway up Route 367, so my mind was put at ease. But now, at the end of Route 367, I was shocked to see it at 10%! If I were to run out of battery, I'd be stuck in whatever gear the bike was in for the rest of the ride.

To save on battery I removed the wireless-communication module (which communicated the untrustworthy battery level to my cycling computer), and tried to avoid shifting as much as possible. In one sense it created a perhaps useful kind of training as I stuck with a single gear through a much wider range of cadence/power than I would naturally do.

With some trepidation I made my way north on Route 303, filled with trucks and blistering cross winds. I'd ridden in strong winds before (e.g. this ride to Osaka), but never at high speed. I guess in this case I was lucky for the trucks, because traffic was moving at the posted 50kph speed limit, so I found some shelter in the lee behind a truck and could avoid some of the stronger gusts.

The first few hundred meters of National Route 162 is a flyover bridge above some railroad tracks, and “officially” bicycles are not allowed on that short stretch. No one was around so I took it, and can't understand why bicycles would be prohibited... it would have been perfectly safe even in heavy traffic. It took 30 seconds to transverse.

15 minutes of pleasant cycling later, I arrived at the first tunnel of National Route 162:

Tunnels with traffic can be particularly dangerous for bicycles, so we're generally aware of them and their condition when planning a route, and try to avoid them when conditions warrant. But with today's theme ride, I'd take all tunnels however they came.

And they came. National Route 367 has six tunnels over its length. They tend to be safer when riding south-to-north because the slope lets you ride with traffic, which is why I did today's loop in this counter-clockwise direction.

The roads I took to move to the start of National Route 162 included two tunnels.

National Route 162, though, has 18(!) tunnels over its length.

Passing through this first tunnel, I emerged to find the Sea of Japan:

The road hugs the coast for a while, but rises and falls sharply. During one of the rises, I took the photo that leads this post.

I wanted to stop by The Mermaid to replicate this photo, but National Route 162 doesn't pass by (it's a block or two over), so I'd have to leave it for another day.

The sign in the photo above had the first mention of Kyoto I'd noticed.

In the photo above, on the left side of the road, there's a temperature readout (23℃, about 74℉). Just behind it, a man dressed in blue is standing... sort of hiding.

In the far background is another policeman with a red “STOP!” flag, who will run out into traffic to stop someone the first policeman identifies as breaking some law. I most commonly see them standing like this near intersections looking for folks who make illegal turns (seemingly ignoring the plethora of folks who brazenly run red lights in the most staggeringly-obvious way), but in this case the first policeman was standing without a good view of an intersection, so I'm guessing he's on the watch for those not wearing seat belts.

I wasn't wearing a seat belt, but somehow skated by safely. 🙂

Not long after this, my front derailleur stopped working, an indication that the battery had reached a critically-low level. By design, the front derailleur stops working first. Eventually, the rear derailleur will stop as well. I still had 80 or 90 kilometers left to get home, and I wasn't in the mood to ride it on a fixie (a bicycle without the ability to change gears), so I went into ultra-conservative mode, changing gears only at the top or bottom of big climbs.... maybe once every 10 or 20 kilometers.

Not long after this came the most-wonderful Miyama Morisato Descent, a lovely descent on gently curving very-well-paved no-traffic road, so it was painful to be stuck in the small chainring... I'd spin out at about 45kph. I still managed a PR (personal record) on it because the one other time I'd done it was with Gorm, where descents are social.

Next time.

By now I was far enough south to be out of the rain for the rest of the trip.

My derailleur aside, things were going great, so I stopped into a ramen place near the Kasa Tunnel, for wild-boar raman...

After eating, I had just 20km (12½mi) to go on National Route 162, mostly downhill, with three final tunnels. There was one short climb that had me worried from a derailleur point of view... I wanted the hardest gear for all the downhill, but worried that I might be stuck in it for the climb.

I was aided in my lack of fast downhill gears by slow traffic, so I could just hum along smoothly until a short traffic stop for road construction at which I could get in front of a big truck. Once construction allowed us to move again, I guess everyone was stuck behind the truck because I had the road to myself for the rest of the way into Kyoto. It was a bit eerie. Despite being stuck in a small front chainring, I made a PR on the descent into Takao.

That short climb turned out not to be a problem, and I soon found myself in the city.

With all the stops, National Route 162 took about 5 hours 45 minutes, so with stops I averaged about 21 kph. (For reference, on this ride I averaged almost 32kph for 180km — 19.7mph for 112 mi — though that route was flatter.)

I still felt great, so wanted to use the opportunity of having just ridden 200+km to pile on a few more miles, so I headed up to Shogunzuka, where I used to go up often for sunset photos...

Still wanting to add a few more miles, I headed to a sort-of-far Liquor Mountain store to fetch some treat-for-a-job-well-done Sangria Peñasol, which I discovered some years ago at a wine-tasting event.

Here's the Relive.cc video....

The first thing I did when I got home was to charge the Di2 battery.