I've been meaning to write about a nice little solo ride I had two weeks ago, to the Ochiba Jinja shrine. It's the same place that I wrote about in “Great Day in Kyoto’s Colorful Northern Mountains”, which actually happened the next day.

The course for this day's solo ride can be seen on my cycling heatmap.

The fall colors had been pretty subdued, but with my health back after six weeks of colds/allergy/something, everything looked beautiful to me.

The small sign pointed up what looked like a driveway, but turned out to be an old logging road. I probably shouldn't have taken it on my road bike, but I tend to throw that kind of caution to the wind and just do it, so I just did it.

At first is was very rough/broken pavement, but then it smoothed out...

It was about 1.4km at 9.5% of increasingly rough road, mostly gravel of some sort. It'd be great on a mountain bike or even my Trek cross bike, but it was no place for a road bike with dainty tires.

Returning the way I came, I had to go very slowly due to the combination of rough road and steepness, and found that my wrists hurt a lot. After a while I couldn't stand it, and intended to stop to rest my wrists and almost fell over because I suddenly couldn't unclip my foot from the pedal! (You'll recall that I had a lot of trepidation about riding clipped in, but that I also quickly got used to it.)

Luckily I was able to switch my weight over and unclip with the other side. I soon realized the source of my problem:

I had somehow lost two of the three bolts that hold the clips to the shoe! This allowed the clip to swivel, making it impossible to unclip without dislocating my knee or dismounting. I was in a bit of a pickle until I got the idea of moving one of the three bolts over from the other shoe. Luckily I had a multifunction tool with an appropriate hex wrench.

I then continued down almost back to the main road, until I stopped here:

Having faced much worse with my first flat, I put what I learned in its aftermath to good use, shoving a thick foil cookie wrapper between the new tube and the split in the tire, to stop the tube from squeezing out and bursting.

With the tire patched up well enough, I continued my ride. I had a second spare tube and a patch kit I could still use on the first tube, should I need it.

I was in an exploring mood, so took the time to stop on a bridge I often go over for a photo looking down...

Being in an exploring mood, I found the old side road that went down there and took a photo looking back up...

I took the side road for quite a while, until it got sufficiently bumpy to have me worry about the tire, so I left the full exploration of it for another day.

Then I continued north for another 10 minutes and I was at the Ochiba Jinja shrine...

Clicking on any of the “nearby photos” links brings photos from years past.

I headed back home amidst the autumn late-afternoon light. The view over the Kamo River back close to home was crisk:

This was all 16 days ago (Nov 10). I went to the same shrine again today (Nov 26) with Paul Barr, by car, and found it to be in quite a different condition.

Continued here...