As I posted the other day, I made a visit to Suntory's Whisky Distillery in the Yamazaki area just south of Kyoto. Eric and I arrived early for the tour, so we wandered a bit.

A public road bisects the distillery campus, and while the road then turns 90° to wrap up behind and beyond the campus, the logical straight-ahead continuation brings you to Shiio Shrine, apparently on Suntory property.

The public road heads off to the right, pitching up sharply (~15% grade). It looked inviting to cycle, so I came back later by bicycle to poke around. I also [...]

Instead of writing up the full blog post about my visit the other day to Suntory's Yamazaki Distillery, I instead did a short bicycle ride to the area, to investigate all the short-but-steep roads nestled in where the city meets the mountain.

On the way, I went through the belly of the sprawling Yamazaki Junction, mentioned in a comment on the blog post where I featured photos of the rat's-nest Kumiyama Junction....

It's much more complex than the one I wrote about before, but much less photogenic...

It's more complex in that it includes an entrance and an exit that [...]

Some photos from this ride that I did yesterday...

On the way out of the city, I swung by the Kitano Tenmangu Shrine to see their famous plum blossoms...

The Kitano Tenmangu Shrine is known for its plum blossoms (seen many times on my blog, such as here, here, and here), but is also richly photogenic in its own right.

I then headed over to Arashiyama and mountains west...

After taking the photo above, I realized that I'd never taken the road leading off to the left, so did.

A far cry from the first time I took in this [...]

On a recent bicycle ride I was surprised to find myself passing the nearest Costco to Kyoto, about 25km (15mi) away. I was a member years ago, and mentally, it was a long way away, taking 45 minutes to drive there through traffic, with $15 of tolls along the way. Unfun. My driving geographic knowledge often never connects to my cycling geographic knowledge, so I'm surprised in this way often.

Anyway, I made a ride to Costco yesterday, explicitly to sign up for a membership and do some shopping. Manseki was going to be heading in the general direction, so [...]

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).