I made my first visit in a long while to the Suntory Whisky Distillery down in Yamazaki today. I wrote about it five years ago in "Japan’s First Whisky: Suntory’s Yamazaki Distillery".

The grounds also includes a "whisky museum", which I wrote about at about the same time in "Suntory Yamazaki Distillery Photogenic Whisky Museum".

To be continued...

Some photos from this ride that I did yesterday...

On the way out of the city, I swung by the Kitano Tenmangu Shrine to see their famous plum blossoms...

The Kitano Tenmangu Shrine is known for its plum blossoms (seen many times on my blog, such as here, here, and here), but is also richly photogenic in its own right.

I then headed over to Arashiyama and mountains west...

After taking the photo above, I realized that I'd never taken the road leading off to the left, so did.

A far cry from the first time I took in this [...]

Here are some more photos of last week's Kyoto Marathon, which I posed about earlier in "Winning the Kyoto Marathon 2017 (Papa Division)"

After Elena passed, I went to another location to try to catch her again, where there's a turnaround so I could get a view of the runners coming directly at me.

Unfortunately, Police wouldn't let anyone linger at the one good viewing spot, despite it being the one spot anywhere nearby where a gathered crowd wouldn't inconvenience others. It made no sense, but it's just as well because it turns out that Elena had passed before I [...]

On a recent bicycle ride I was surprised to find myself passing the nearest Costco to Kyoto, about 25km (15mi) away. I was a member years ago, and mentally, it was a long way away, taking 45 minutes to drive there through traffic, with $15 of tolls along the way. Unfun. My driving geographic knowledge often never connects to my cycling geographic knowledge, so I'm surprised in this way often.

Anyway, I made a ride to Costco yesterday, explicitly to sign up for a membership and do some shopping. Manseki was going to be heading in the general direction, so [...]

Today was the 2017 Kyoto Marathon. As in some years past (2012, 2014, 2015) I went out for a few photos of the 16,000 runners.

This little scene unfolded before me at a corner 500m (⅓ mile) before the finish...

According to his bib-number stats, this guy (木村剛 / Goh Kimura) finished in 3:55:21, which includes the unusually-long 9:44 it took him to get to the starting line (and, of course, includes the time needed for the event above).

I was able to find in the shots I took earlier, as well... can you find him in this shot from [...]