Continued here...

This post is a longer version of Friday's "Checking On the Carpet of Yellow at the Ochiba Shrine", in which I posted two quick photos from a ride that day to check out the colors at the Iwato Ochiba Shrine (岩戸落葉神社) in the mountains northwest of Kyoto. I started writing this followup post the next day, but have been so busy since I'm only finishing it today.

I normally like long rides, I guess to amortize the once-per-ride overhead of dealing with everything (the before and after of clothes, bike, electronics, data, and self), but I didn't get started [...]

I took a short ride out to check out the status of Ochiba Shrine. It's still a few days... maybe three, maybe five... from peak. It seems early this year. When I first posted about it five years ago, it was from a Dec 2 visit.

Yet, the next year I visited on Nov 14, and it was about the same as it was today (Nov 18). Maybe it takes time, because the same year I posted one of my first wigglegrams from the shrine, with full-carpet photos taken on Nov 25.

Even more surprising to me is that last [...]

(Only iPhone photos today, sorry)

The other day I went for a ride with Ionut and his friend Suzuki-san (view on Strava). We started with the two-part climb up to th Ushio Kannon Temple in the Yamashina area of Kyoto.

The first part is 2.1 km (1.3 miles) at 8%, which isn't so bad unless the road is wet, in which case it's suicide. In the most-steep areas entire width of the road is inexplicably painted red (perhaps to warn you to the steepness?) but the paint makes for a ridiculously slippery surface when wet.

Here's a photo from a [...]

After a wonderful ride with friends beyond Kyoto's Mt. Atago the other day, I returned the next day for 110km (68mi) of solo exploration in the same general area.

Early on in the ride I passed through Arashiyama in western Kyoto, with its famous bridge. We've seen it before on my blog in rain and in sun and crowned by a rainbow. Today was fairly bland, but a big bird was doing a batman pose, so that was something.

There's a path along the river southwest of the bridge that leads up to a temple with a great view that [...]