I had a nice ride the other day with Andy Clark and Michael Edwards.

While meeting up in the morning, Nigel Randell happened to stop by on his way to work...

And we were approached by an American tourist passing by who saw our nice bikes and just wanted to say "hi"...

It turns out that he works for Strava, the running/riding community site where your activities can be mapped and compared to your prior efforts and to others. In the nine months since I started cycling, I've been absolutely shocked at how motivating Strava has been for me; upon [...]

Yesterday was the inaugural social ride hosted by NORU Kyoto. Whatever allergy/sickness that has been plaguing me of late was in remission, so a slow relaxing group ride seemed perfect for me.

This was my first ride with Tomas, the fastest rider in the group. Although I'd not ridden with Tomas before, we'd chatted at other events and share an interest in photography and programming. I was happy that my first ride with him was a slow social group ride, allowing me to keep up and chat.

To give a sense of Tomas' speed, his time on my benchmark Hanase [...]

I had the pleasure to have lunch today with Rick and Lily Hancock, visiting from Seattle. Rick has been reading my blog for years, and often comments, so we finally met "IRL" (In Real Life).

We spent all our time talking over ramen at Gogyo (五行) so didn't have much time for an outing afterwards, but walked over to the Rokkaku-do Temple for a few pictures.

As I described on this post six years ago, it's common at temples and shrines to pay a small fee for a random "fortune paper". If you get a good one, you take it [...]

I started helping out Australian professor Jim Breen with his "edict" online Japanese-English dictionary in about 1989 when it had less than 3,000 entries. It has more than 230,000 now. In all the intervening years we'd met in real life only once, about 15 years ago, so I was very happy to meet him for lunch today as he finishes up a long hiking vacation in Japan.

He mentioned an interest in Yuba, so I knew the perfect spot, Junsei Okabeya (清水順正 おかべ家), which I wrote about several years ago here.

It's near the Kiyomizu Temple, so I went there [...]

The other day I got to participate in a relaxing countryside tour in the city of Otsu, next to Kyoto. The tour company, Tour du Lac Biwa ("Lake Biwa Tours"), specializes in unique experiences of things not generally open to the public (even to Japanese) combined with countryside food and hospitality, all presented in English.

この間、面白い事できました。このヴィデオ（NHKより）は簡単に説明します。

When I've gone on tours by them in the past (including this, this, this, and this) it's usually been as a "test foreigner" to give them feedback as they design their tours, and to share my photos with them. It's a symbiotic relationship, where [...]