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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Saturday was a NORU group ride with 14 people, my first big group ride this year, I think. (The first NORU group ride was this lovely ride last fall.)

Vincent was doing something that looked quite strange... can you notice it in the photo?

Vincent suggested we take a short alternate to the planned route, down a lovely descent. I had the camera and so took it slow at first, but still got upwards of a safe 70kph. So fun.

The route brings us past a picturesque lake with a cemetery on the hillside opposite. It was pretty hazy so [...]

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去年の成人の日、「三十三間堂大的全国大会」の撮影。14ヶ月遅いですが、この記事の続きです。

As I seem to do more often than not, I never did follow up on an early-2015 blog post that I intended to be just an introduction. In January 2015 I posted "The 2015 Young-Adult Archery Event at the Sanjusangendo Temple" with a few pictures and a "To be continued..." ending. So here we are, 16 months later, I've come across the event in my photo archives.The event for recently-come-of-age adults is introduced and descried on the earlier post, so I'll just get into the photos.

As I've mentioned in other posts about this annual event, the crowds are [...]

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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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