A friend in Kyoto that I've known for years has recently opened a second location for her shop, Tea Ceremony Camellia, which offers tea-ceremony experiences in English. Her new location, Camellia GARDEN, is quite picturesque, and after many missed tries to get our schedules to converge, I was able to stop by for an hour the other day to try for some photos.

We didn't have any plan for any specific photos, and didn't have much time, so I just went for some of the low-hanging fruit, to help build ideas for a real photoshoot some day.

Here's a hastily-made [...]

My, how time flies. I took this wigglegram in 2014, which surprises me because it doesn't feel like I've been doing them nearly that long. Last year I posted another wigglegram from the same outing, in "A Couple of Autumn Wigglegrams for My Niece Jena".

I had briefly touched on the outing in "A Quick Peek at Kyoto’s Hanadera Temple", which itself has a wigglegram, so I guess I was in the mood that day.

This temple is wonderful to visit, but it's difficult to get to by public transport. I'm more likely to bicycle by, as it's near the [...]

I had a nice ride through the mountains of Uji and Wazuka (Japan, near Kyoto/Nara) the other day. Both Uji (宇治) and Wazuka (和 束) have been famous for their tea for centuries, and have tea fields tucked away in the most seemingly-unlikely nooks and crannies of their mountains.

Here's the ride at Strava:

I had a number of specific goals when embarking on this ride:

Goal: ride at least a "century" of distance (100 miles, 161km). Actual: 167km / 105 miles. ✔

Goal: vertical climb of at least 3,000m (9,850'). Actual: 3,506m / 11,503' ✔

Goal: get a PR [...]

This post picks up from part one on my two-year-cycleversary ride though the snowy mountains north of Kyoto. I'd suffered a spell of frozen fingers, but was now mostly warm again and in good spirits.

The area is fantastically beautiful in the snow.

As I mentioned in Part One, riding through the semi-compact snow with thin (28mm) road-bike tires often felt like my tires had to work like ice breakers, shoving through a semi-frozen slushiness of evil-Goldilocks consistency (it's not strong enough to support the weight of the bike, nor weak enough to be easily shoved out of the way).

I started cycling two years ago when I naïvely went on this ride, joining only because I had no clue about what was intended. We ended up doing 55km (34 miles), which was probably 10× what I had ever ridden before. I was invigorated to have done so easily what I would have imagined would be impossible, so I decided to set out on a "real" ride, a longer, hillier one done with intention.

So a week later, on Feb 7 2015, I did another ride -- what I now consider my first "real" bicycle ride -- a 91km (57mi) [...]