I went on a bicycle ride yesterday that involved 13 people, the largest group I'd been on to date. It was fun, but I also learned some important lessons.

It was quite the international gathering, with folks from Australia, Canada, England, Finland, Japan, Norway, Philippines, and The States.

The first lesson I learned was to pay attention to what weather forecast I looked at. Yesterday in Kyoto city proper the actual weather (spritzy rain in the morning; otherwise sunny all day) sort of matched the forecast (10% chance of rain all day), but our ride into the mountains was in [...]

今回のサイクリングは京都→大阪→妙見山(豊能郡)→京都でした。この記事は大阪城までの分を含めている。

For our Wednesday ride this week, the plan was to cycle down to Osaka and see the city a bit, then slog up through the dense suburbia to the mountains, then up and over them back to Kyoto.

This post is about 49-km (31-mile) ride from Kyoto to Osaka, primarily on bike paths along the rivers that cut through the concrete jungle filling the flatlands between mountains (the concrete jungle seen in this long shot of the Osaka skyline from Kyoto).

This time I've based the time ("+9 min" above) and distance ("2.8 km" above) under each photo on [...]

昨日サイクリングをして大阪へ行きました。途中で金光万石さんの写真を撮ったけれども、カメラの設定のミスのせいでかなり露出過度にしまった。 写真は良くなかったが、ソフトで調整してから上の結果を出せました。結果は本人と同じ位格好良いだと思います。

Out on a cycle ride to Osaka yesterday, I snapped a photo of cycling buddy Manseki Kanemitsu as we rode. The photo was wildly overexposed due to a camera-settings mistake on my part, but with some futzing in Lightroom I made something of it that I like.

I was using the new Panasonic LX100 that I wrote about the other day, but trying it in a different mode where I control both the shutter speed and aperture, and let the camera adjust the image-sensor sensitivity to suit the specific brightness of the moment. In this case I wanted [...]

On Wednesday Gorm and I did a 140km (88 mile) cycling ride to Miyama. It had 2,350m (7,800') of vertical climb, and though just a few days prior I had done a much tougher ride, this is the one that wiped me out.

The "7:31 AM (+1h 8m) - 13 km (8 miles)" note under the photo above means that it was taken at 7:31am, an hour and 8 minutes of rest and travel (and 13km of travel) after I'd left my house; this kind of note is under each photo to help give a sense of travel.

Our route [...]

I had a nice bicycle outing on Wednesday with friends, riding around Lake Biwa (the largest lake in Japan). I ended up covering about 230km (143 miles).

Despite being almost twice as long as my previously-longest ride, it was much easier for two reasons: it was mostly flat (just 1,600m / 5,250' of vertical climb over the 230km, compared to, for example, 2,500m / 8,300' over 99km), and I was much better at keeping myself filled with calories. I'm starting to discover that it's easier to ride the bicycle when you have energy.

To explain the last line of the [...]