I've ridden my bike to Osaka three times so far. The first time was this ride in June; I'm using photos from that ride on today's post.

The second time was last month with a non-Cycling friend, and the third was yesterday, by myself.

A drunk man in the train knocked Anthony's phone to the ground, smashing its screen. Anthony being a kid, and the drunk man being a drunk man, Anthony felt he could do nothing but suck it up. Part of sucking it up means visiting the closest Apple Store to have the screen replaced, so I took [...]

I had a nice ride the other day with Andy Clark and Michael Edwards.

While meeting up in the morning, Nigel Randell happened to stop by on his way to work...

And we were approached by an American tourist passing by who saw our nice bikes and just wanted to say "hi"...

It turns out that he works for Strava, the running/riding community site where your activities can be mapped and compared to your prior efforts and to others. In the nine months since I started cycling, I've been absolutely shocked at how motivating Strava has been for me; upon [...]

Yesterday was the inaugural social ride hosted by NORU Kyoto. Whatever allergy/sickness that has been plaguing me of late was in remission, so a slow relaxing group ride seemed perfect for me.

This was my first ride with Tomas, the fastest rider in the group. Although I'd not ridden with Tomas before, we'd chatted at other events and share an interest in photography and programming. I was happy that my first ride with him was a slow social group ride, allowing me to keep up and chat.

To give a sense of Tomas' speed, his time on my benchmark Hanase [...]

I built a "heatmap" showing all the places I've ridden my bicycle since getting into cycling earlier this year. I thought it might be interesting for visitors researching rides they might want to try.

It's here: "Heatmap of Jeffrey's Cycling in Kyoto".

At the moment it includes data on 76 rides, with areas of yellow and red being more-often visited roads.

Clicking anywhere I've ridden brings up a list of rides that passed the area...

In the example above, I'd ridden the clicked-on road three times. Clicking then on the most-recent ride name highlights the whole ride on the map, [...]

Only a month and a half late, I'm finally getting around to posting about Stage Two of Bridget and Sarah's Tour de Kyoto. These two visitors from Australia were introduced in Bridget and Sarah’s Tour-de-Kyoto, Part 1 and Part 2.

The morning had revealed that Sarah's tire did not survive the previous day's puncture-festival, but Manseki kindly loaned her a wheel, so she could ride for the day.

These pictures at the entrance to the Kurama Temple were on our way to the first big climb of the day, Kyoto's big "Hanase Pass", which rises 500m over 5.8km for an [...]