A couple of Aussies on a cycling vacation in Japan contacted the Cycling Kyoto! group on Facebook looking for interesting rides in the area. A group of us ended up going on two rides in two days with Sarah Knights and Bridget Slocum, hard-core amateur cyclists that compete on the national level in Australia.

As it turns out, they're also fun people.

Manseki Kanemitsu and I met the girls near their hotel and moved across town toward the mountains to the west, picking up folks along the way....

After also picking up Mone Sakura, we headed toward the Arashiyama area [...]

It's been half a year since our vacation brought us to Horseshoe Bend in Page Arizona, so I guess it's time to finally post some pictures.

Just like the stunning Antelope Canyon that we visited earlier in the day, from afar the place looks like nothing special...

Being a desert, there's sand (very fine powdery sand) everywhere. A path through it leads from the parking lot up a long rise. Here's a photo from about halfway up, looking back:

When you crest the hill, you see pretty much what you saw everywhere else, except for the addition of a big [...]

San Francisco friends Eric and Gigi are in town again. We last saw them earlier in the year buying a Kimono and playing in the snow. Yesterday they made a visit to the Kiyomizu Temple, and I popped over to join them.

It was a Monday, but the place was crazy crowded like during a high-season weekend. The economy must really be doing better.

Eric and Gigi like to shoot portraiture, and the challenge in a setting 8like this is to find places and angles that omit the crowd, yet still lend a feeling of the location. As we instinctively [...]

Having done a short excursion riding while clipped to the pedals, yesterday I set off on a longer mountain ride to really give them a workout.

昨日のサイクリングは、特別靴を使って、靴とペダルは繋がったままに乗りました。

I didn't have any trouble at the beginning, except at the very beginning when it took me about 10 seconds of trying to clip in before I realized that I hadn't taken the cleat covers (to make walking down to the bike easier) off. Doh!

The ride ended up being 54km (33mi) with 1,190m (3,900') of elevation gain. This is pretty mild for me, but it was my first real ride in more [...]

今日は初めてちゃんとしたサイクリング用の靴を使って、美味く出来ました。倒れる心配は有りましたが、今日は倒れなかった。

After posting "Trepidation and Anticipation: Moving Up to Cycling Shoes" yesterday, I put the pedals on my bike and today I went out for a short test ride with them.

It was much easier than I had feared.

After putting the pedals on yesterday, I tried mounting the bike stationary in my house, and I had a lot of difficulty unclipping the shoes from the pedals, so my fear of falling over went way up. But then it was suggested that perhaps the bolts weren't tight enough, and indeed that was the problem. Once I tightented things properly, it [...]