Just a quick writeup with some pictures of a nice group ride that I did two weeks ago with some of the stronger riders from Cycling Kyoto!. I was by far the newest, weakest, slowest, least experienced among them, but they're a nice fun group so they made me feel welcome.

今回の写真は二週間前のサイクリングの事です。

It was wet from a recent rain, so quite slippery. Discretion is the better part of valor, so Tomas aborted the attempt. I didn't even try. But as Rick H had suggested, I did measure the slope with the Compass Tool in my iPhone:

UPDATE: I originally wrote [...]

I've discovered an issue with how an iPhone give location information to apps, an issue that can have a dramatic impact on the accuracy of location data. The impact is either really good or really bad, depending on what the app (and you) want to use the location information for.

The issue is that the iPhone can get into a mode where instead of providing apps with your location directly from its normal location-tracking methods (GPS/GLONASS, WiFi and cell-tower signal strength), it "snaps" the location to the center of the nearest road it knows about. I call this "snap to [...]

As I mentioned in "Confused Kyoto Cherry Trees Bloom Five Months Early", Paul Barr and I rode our bikes down to Osaka from Kyoto. It's about 50km each way, so the round trip was about 100km (62mi) total.

Here's our trip on my cycling heatmap.

I'd made the same trip by myself earlier in the week, and written how windy it was for much of the day, but the wind during the trip down with Paul was by far the strongest sustained winds I'd ever ridden a bicycle in, on par with a medium-sized typhoon. It was just ridiculous. [...]

Today on a ride from Kyoto to Osaka Castle with Paul Barr, early on the trip while still in Kyoto we came across some cherry blossoms that had apparently gotten confused by the cold spell in October followed by a warm spell earlier this month... they seem to be blooming five months early!

Some varieties of cherry do normally bloom in November, such as we've over the years here, here, and here, but their branches are sparsely populated with blossoms. Today's were full:

今日の出会った桜は十月桜ではないだと思いますが、どんな種類のは分からない。実は、梅や桃ではかも知れません。

Whatever they were, they were pretty and out of place.

I made a short video of [...]

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 [...]