Sorry for not posting anything recently. I've felt remarkably unmotivated in all things lately, but found some inspiration in an email from someone asking about this mountain roller slide that I'd posted about some years ago. Now that I'm into cycling (though currently generally unmotivated about it), I thought I'd ride to the location to see whether it's still there.

Here's the ride:

Along the way I came across a lovely lotus field in the middle of the suburbs.

Next was to explore a short but steep (and nicely-paved) climb I'd seen here. It starts under a new expressway bridge...

Next was the main climb of the day, the full Yoshimine-dera Temple climb, ostensibly 3.6km (2.3 mi) at 10.2%, but the first kilometer is relatively mild, then it ramps up quickly.

Halfway through is a section of 450m at 17% that ends at the parking-lot entrance to the temple, but the actual road continues to wind up almost two dozen switchbacks:

I made a PR on the first half by a wide margin, but had to stop before plodding on to slowly finish the climb.

The temple itself, which I didn't visit on this trip, is quite nice, especially in the fall. It's been on my blog many times over the years, such as in “The Whole Gamut of My Blog In One Spectacular Visit to the Yoshiminedera Temple”

Anyway, I eventually made my way the remaining 12km to the location of the slide, which is in a small entertainment complex that includes the ability to pick your own mushrooms that you can have cooked there, or bring home. I opted to just stop in the cafe for curry:

The section with the slide is an area called “山びこの森”...

Cost is 210 yen (~$2) per person, though elementary-school aged and below are free. The photo above is taken pretty much at the little kiosk where you pay. A ticket is good for all day, in and out as you like.

Open every day but Tuesday.

Frankly, without a bazillion kids enjoying the area, it's sort of pathetic. There are a couple of teeter-totters, the slide, and the “Tarzan rope” mentioned here, and that's about it.

To ride the slide, first grab one of the pads lying around or in the shed near the bottom....

Climb the path to the top of the slide. It affords nice views of the slide as you go...

It takes some balance on the pad to get up any speed. Going slowly, it took me 30 seconds to get to the bottom, but with some seating adjustments it could go much more quickly, I think.

I'm not sure how much effort it's worth to try to visit this place, but it can be reached via bus from JR Takatsuki Station, though there are less than a dozen buses a day:

The left three columns show the schedule from the train station to the area, for (left to right) weekdays, Saturdays, and Sundays/holidays. The row number shows the hour of the day; a number within a box indicates the minute (in that hour) when the bus leaves, and in parenthesis, the bus's destination. For example, on weekdays, a bus leaves the train station at 1:15pm, headed toward 杉生. The bus before that is at 11:37, and the one after is 3:55.

There's a bus stop right at the complex, called “森林センター前”. It takes about 40 minutes in the bus.

The right-side three columns show the return buses to the train station. The last one on a weekday is 7:38pm

After leaving, I went to explore some new roads, and found some lovely ones, as well as one that had seen better days...

The first new road I tried, a long and lovely climb followed by a descent with many questionable sections of road, as seen above, joined civilization at a spot I'd ridden by in the past:

The rest of the ride was fairly uneventful. I was disappointed to find that a 10km section during the return trip, which had looked like a lovely descent on a big sweeping road, turned out to be quite unlovely because it cut through miles and miles of strip mining, and so the road surface had become horribly pitted from the thousands of dump trucks over the years, so it was decidedly unfun. To make it worse, there was a strong headwind filled with sand and gravel from the mining operations, so it was an uncomfortable struggle even going downhill.

This satellite view gives some sense of it. It's not a road I'll be trying again any time soon.

Closer to home, there's a lot of construction of some sort along the river... there were dozens of dump trucks visible at once. Here's where they were rejoining the road...