This post picks up from "Bridget and Sarah’s Tour-de-Kyoto, Part 1" about a great ride with a couple of Aussie girls visiting Kyoto. That first part of the story left off 3½ hours and 41km into our ride, after Eric had fixed his flat.

We got almost four whole minutes farther down the road before the next flat, this time on Sarah's bike.

Despite the rain, things got bright after that because we didn't get another flat for almost a full 30 minutes!

The rain abated a bit, so later when after having crested a short mountain pass, I went [...]

Manu Mohan and Manseki Kanemitsu joined me on light ride to Osaka Castle and back. It was my first ride with Manu since we tackled Seryo Pass three months ago.

Manu's bike is a folding commuter bike, which is not really appropriate for "real" cycling. It's too small for him and the range of gears is limited, but the ride to Osaka is not challenging except for its length. The round trip is more than 100km.

His rear tire seemed a bit low on air, something that would rob him of speed and power. If he had a normal road [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]