If you would have told me half a year ago that I would be riding a bicycle as far as 10km, I would have never believed you. Bicycles where for places too close for a taxi or my scooter or a car.

It's amazing how "giving it a try" can change your opinion about something.

On Thursday I retraced the path I took on my first "real" ride last February, covered in "Attempting a 100km Bikeride in the Mountains of Kyoto, Part 1: Hanase Pass" and then "Part 2: the Last 70km". The tough part of this ride is not [...]

I had a wonderful little bike ride today, 48km distance with 1,720m of elevation gain (30 miles of distance with 5,600 feet of elevation gain). (The report of the ride at Strava reports longer distance and less elevation gain, but I trust Google's elevation data for Kyoto more than I truest my phone's GPS/GLONASS unit's elevation.)

Things didn't start well.

I went downstairs to my bike to find the rear tire quite flat, likely a slow leak from the spoke problem I had on the ride last week. I'd ridden 70km after it was fixed so I thought it was [...]

I finally made my first 100+km bike ride the other day, cycling with some folks from the Cycling Kyoto Facebook group.

Strava says the ride was 105km (65 miles). Even though it's 10% longer than the first long ride I did, this time was much easier because it had only 1,300m (4,200 ft) of vertical rise, only about a ⅓rd of the first ride's climbs. Even last month's 58km ride was much harder, again, due to having more elevation. Flat distance seems to be easy.

Anyway, as usual we met in front of the Sanjo St. Starbucks...

The route I'd [...]

I got to meet Matt Campagna of The Turning Gate Software yesterday for coffee, conversation, and a hike over the mountain paths of the Fushimi Inari Shrine (伏見稲荷大社). He makes highly-regarded Web Gallery plugins for Lightroom, so we had plenty to talk about with the release of Lightroom 6 that had happened earlier that day.

I think this is my second wigglegrams I've published from this location, the first having been this one in December. Neither are quite as nice the previous wigglegram I published last weekend. 😉

I've tweaked the code for the wigglegram on this one so [...]

Here's a wigglegram from the same outing that produced "Photoshoot at the Peak of the Haradanien Garden’s Awesomeness".

I think it's nicer than my first Haradanien wigglegram, for a variety of reasons.

However, when I showed this to a friend, he said that he felt that the foliage in the foreground was a bit distracting. My reaction was "there's foliage?" 🙂

Joanne (at left) had to leave Kyoto that day, but Ting Ting (at right) joined my friends for a photoshoot the next day (which I couldn't participate in because I was making tofu). But I could join in the [...]