It's still six weeks before the fall colors arrive in Kyoto, so here's a look forward with a few shots from various outings last year.

My cycling buddies would be surprised to know that they likely pass this garden fairly often. (Those curious about the location can follow the map link under the photo).

今回の更新は去年の秋のいろいろ。

Other posts from the outings that these photos came from include:

"Great Day in Kyoto’s Colorful Northern Mountains, and at Strava’s Kyoto Office" "Cycling to Kyoto’s Ochiba Shrine Amid the Fall Colors" "The Tenjuan Temple (Fall Colors and a Wigglegram)" "Wigglegram of a Pleasant Couple [...]
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今年の一月（八ヶ月前）、万石さんと万石さんの知り合い樋口さんとサイクリングをしました。 やっと記事をアップします。遠いの山田舎の息障寺まで行きました。

I'm finally getting around to post about a great day of cycling last January (8 months ago), with Manseki and an acquaintance of his, Higuchi-san, to a far-flung temple I knew of in the middle of nowhere.

We met up in front of the Ishiyama Temple in Otsu.

It's a lovely, photogenic temple that I first visited four years ago, and now ride by fairly often.

It's perhaps difficult to see in the photo above, but just flanking either side of the entrance are huge bamboo New Year displays, the one on the right in the process of [...]

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Now that I'm out of action for a while, I'll try to make some headway in my blogging. This post is sort of a followup to last month's "Lovely Bicycle Ride Revisiting Uji Countryside Photographed Five Years Ago", because I returned to the area on my next ride to continue exploring.

The ride ended up being lovely, appearing on Strava as "Uji #3 - Wet & Slimy Satisfaction 宇治市の満足":

I hit as many mountain climbs as I could fit in, so the ride ended up with over 3000m (10,000') of climb, but I was just enjoying to explore, so taking [...]

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Six years ago, while on an exploratory scooter trip into the mountains (the kind of trip I now do by bicycle), I came across an abandoned restaurant next to the entrance of an equestrian park.

This abandoned building did appear on my blog once, five and a half years ago in "My Faux-Mat Photoshop Script is Out", but while other photos from that photogenic outing made it to my blog (here, here, and here), and on that trip I "discovered" the "Middle-of-Nowhere Sokushouji Temple", posting about this abandoned restaurant has remained on my to-do list.

It came to my mind [...]

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I spent the most wonderful day on Friday cycling around the mountains beyond Uji City, near Kyoto.

I had gone to the area earlier in the week for what I called a "Kasatori Festival", doing the climb up Mt. Kasatori from all four directions. It's a tiny mountain that I visited on one of my first bike rides, at that time finishing just one of the short climbs utterly spent.

I'm in better shape now, though the ridiculously-steep Eastern approach climb killed me.

While futzing around with the ride data afterwards, I realized that this was the area I visited [...]

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