After long rides on Wednesday and Thursday, and a very hard workout at the gym on Friday, my legs have been extremely sore, so today I went on an easy "recovery ride" in the city, just to get my muscles moving a bit.

It was nice... I go the "KOM" (best registered time) on the highly-sought-after "Jolly Hat" segment.

Doing an image search for "Strava art" yields many impressive results. Some are sort of "fake", like this famous "cyclist" drawing and this famous "bear" drawing, but many are real and amazing. (I put "fake" in quotes because they are indeed [...]

So, my web site was down for a few days. Sorry about that.

It doesn't happen often, but this time was a doozy. The ISP hosting my server went bankrupt, and by the time I found out, my server was sitting dead on the floor of a warehouse.

I've got to say, though, I'm actually very thankful.

My web hosting has always been free, a kind, ongoing gift from a former coworker at Yahoo!. Even though we haven't talked for a decade, he's let my server sit in his business and occasionally burn up some of his support staff's time. [...]

I had quite the little cycling adventure yesterday, venturing into some areas I'd never been, and facing the most heinously-steep road I'd ever seen. The total distance was 191km (118mi), making it my 7th-longest ride ever. This blog post, mostly as a diary for myself, is almost as long.

The distance was no problem, but as it seems with many of my longer rides, lack of time management does me in and I have to kill myself to get back in time for something (in this case Saturday-evening Mass).

The outline of this ride was simple... head down to Iga [...]

I made another visit to the hard-to-reach Ushio Kannon Temple, which I wrote about a couple of months ago, but this time I went by car and took my nice camera. The beautiful, rich matte red of this dimly-lit statue caught my eye...

I don't know anything about Buddhism, but this statue is apparently of a Wisdom King named "Ragaraja", a "dharmapala deity" that is "known to transform worldly lust into spiritual awakening", according to Wikipedia.

Visually it's quite interesting, and was one of many in a small, dimly-lit hall.

To be continued...

Ah, the wide open road, one of the great benefits of cycling, getting away from the stress of the city and immersing oneself in nature, freeing oneself, at least temporarily, from the coffin of electronics that our modern lives have become.

Cycling lets you leave the electronic shackles behind, and connect with nature and friends.

Don't get me wrong.... hiking can be great, as can motorcycling. Both get you away from the rat race, but cycling seems to hit the sweet spot. You can see a larger variety of different scenery than you can on foot, yet you're still "raw" [...]