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" [...]

Continuing on from "The Back Entrance to Shiga’s Eigenji Temple" the other day, about a trip last week to the Eigenji Temple (永源寺) about an hour's drive from Kyoto, after entering via the rear gate, you find a closed-off courtyard to one side...

You're not allowed inside, but it's still pretty from the gate.

To give a better sense of the space, here's a wigglegram:

To be continued...

This picture is from the same snowy outing almost two years ago that produced the three-part "Kyoto At Night During a Heavy Snow" posts (part 1 - part 2 - part 3). This shot mimics the one that leads Part 2, but this one was taken five hours later (at 4:42am) after the snow had long stopped falling.

Anyway, it's just a random photo to accompany a recommendation for users of Adobe Lightroom to read Victoria Bampton's "Lightroom Catalogs – Top 10 Misunderstandings" article. New users may find some misconceptions cleared up, while veterans will find a good resource to [...]