Having grown up in Ohio with its summer thunderstorms, I like "dynamic" weather. I enjoy riding my bike in the rain, even if the rain is hard and the wind is blustery, so long as it's warm. If I know it's going to rain, I know I'll get wet and so I'll prepare accordingly, and I'll embrace the rain instead of try to avoid it.

This lack of fear of getting wet is apparently sufficiently rare that it makes me appear to be "crazy" in the eyes of many. Whatever. I enjoy it.

A "supertyphoon" was forecast to pass near [...]

I recently did a bicycle ride that I'd been planning for months: to do Japan's biggest road climb, a single climb going from sea level to Japan's highest paved road at Mt. Norikura, at an elevation of 2,717m (8,914'). As far as I know, it's the biggest possible elevation gain in a single paved-road climb in Japan, and as far as I know, it's never been done, or even known of, until now.

I've ridden that "highest paved road in Japan" road before, as blogged about here, but this time I would start 110km (68mi) away at the ocean (elevation: [...]

This composition, by Montreal photographer Josée Houle, combines my photo of a wall at Kyoto's Myouhouin Temple (妙法院), which I published on a post in 2012, with photos of a model being splashed with colored milk.

Josée described the process to me:

It sounds really messy, but fun, and the result is certainly interesting and fun.

She posted the photo, along with information about it, on Facebook, and also some behind-the-scenes photos here.

As I wrote in my previous post, I recently hiked on Mt. Fuji. Today's post is about the next day's bike ride, a 100+ mile odyssey that included two cycling climbs up Mt. Fuji as far as the paved roads would allow, a typhoon, and a dead iPhone. The dead iPhone explains why there are few photos on this post.

Here's the ride at Strava:

There are no roads to Mt. Fuji's peak at 3,776m (12,389'), of course, but three roads go fairly high up. My initial goal of the day was to ride one of them, the same road [...]

I moved to Japan in 1989, and the person who met me at the airport in Tokyo was Krish Kulkarni, a graduate student at Tokyo University, and the twin brother of Ram Kulkarni, my best friend at my own graduate school in America. I had most recently met both of them a year ago in Tokyo, and last week met Krish and his family as they vacationed in Japan.

Climbing Mt. Fuji was high on the list for Krish's 19-year-old son Vishnu, and they kindly invited me along.

Krish's back was bothering him, and despite a massage in Kyoto from [...]