Manseki and I rode into the mountains of northwest Kyoto to check out some roads I found on the map that we'd never ridden, but in trying to continue after a rest pause, I found my rear tire was flat. It must have been a slow leak of some sort.

Once on our way, we came to the first road to check out, which starts here.

Like so many of Kyoto's rural roads, it was lovely.

We tried both. The one toward the left quickly became gravel so we abandoned it.

The other continued nicely...

And then I got a [...]

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English follows this short Japanese version of the post...

京都から大阪へのサイクリングコースはほとんど良いですが、京都市内では嫌な部分も有ります。 泥、水、砂、凸凹。この範囲は楽しくないので、別のルートを作りました。 ルートは難しくないが、説明はちょっと複雑ですので、上の地図を見て下さい。 それとルートのGPXファイルを準備しました。 帰り道は行く道とちょっと違うし、来年の４月までの工事の為に迂回もあり、４つのダウンロードを作りました。

2017年3月31日まで2017年4月1日から 京都から大阪へ 京都から大阪へ 大阪からの帰り道 大阪からの帰り道

In my first blog post about cycling to Osaka from Kyoto, one can see photos of the lovely bicycle route that spans much of the 40~50 kilometers (~30 miles). My other posts that include the trip also show scenes of the lovely, flat, smooth, bicycle path.

What I haven't shown much, besides the photo above that appeared last week, is a horrible ~4km (~2.5mi) section of the path that exits eastern Kyoto. It's full of teeth-rattling bone-jarring bumps, in [...]

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Having been back in Kyoto for two weeks after having been away for three months, I finally started to ease back into real cycling with my first challenging ride since January (probably since doing Sugino Pass three times in a row on Jan 11).

I'd built up slowly with some simple rides, but nothing with a lot of climbing. I was surprised to find during those simple rides that I was doing much better on short/intense climbs than I did before the three-month break, and I wondered whether this unexplained fitness would transition to longer climbs.

The answer turned out [...]

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After three months away, I'm now back in Japan.

I'd left suddenly at the start of February because my mom had a stroke, but she'd recovered enough by the start of May that I could return.

My return was on United Airlines, which over the decades I've flown more than any other. They used to be a good airline, but have gone stunningly downhill in the last decade (yielding occasional rants from me, such as this and this), so it was with trepidation that I tried again. The saving grace was paying the extra $250 to bump myself up to [...]

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I've so many things that I want to write about lately, but just no time as I help my mom recover from a stroke. But I ran into something so frustrating that I just have to rant a bit....

I worked for Yahoo! from 1997 to 2004, and as such it has a special place in my heart despite how it's deteriorated over the years. Knowing how it's deteriorated, though, didn't prepare me for what I ran into recently when trying to create a Yahoo! account for my mom.

I recently set my folks up with a new TV, a [...]

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