The other day I made an impromptu decision to ride to Amanohashidate (see at Wikipedia) the next morning. It's pretty far away, and in the end the big loop turned out to be 293km (182mi), putting it well past my 260km (160mi) "Cycling to Nagoya for Coffee" ride as my longest.

The evening before I made a clockwise route, but that morning decided to do it the other direction, thinking to put the easier leg on the return trip, so I made a new counterclockwise route (or, I should say, I whipped up a program to reverse route waypoints and [...]

It took a casual spin around Kyoto last weekend, as the cherry blossoms were starting to come in.

Looking down the street from next to the construction, toward the right, it was a mad house:

So, instead I went up the steep road that goes under the shrine arch seen two photos above.

Not long past the shrine gate, I noticed a huge statue off to the side, and wondered how long it had been there and how I had never noticed it before:

It turns out that it's been there since 1955, and is 24m (80') tall. I guess [...]

In my previous post about a visit to Tokyo last weekend, I mentioned that on the bullet-train ride there I'd passed by a mountain with a temple nestled at the top, and thought it might be nice to investigate the presumably steep road up there. It turns out that it was.

The mountain in question is one of a pair of monadnocks in an area that's otherwise flat as a pancake. Here's the view from Google Earth (with elevation exaggerated for effect):

The taller of the two rises about 350m (1,165') above the surrounding plain, which isn't all that tall, [...]

I made a weekend trip to Tokyo to visit two old friends also visiting Tokyo, brothers Ram and Krish Kulkarni. ("Ram", short for "Ramchandera", rhymes with "prom")

Ram has been my best friend for 30 years, since grad school at the University of New Hampshire. When I then moved to Japan, his twin brother Krish, who was at the time a graduate student at the University of Tokyo, picked me up at the airport.

When I got married almost 20 years ago, Ram was living near Mt. Fuji and came down to Kyoto to be my best man. Fumie and [...]

As I posted the other day, I made a visit to Suntory's Whisky Distillery in the Yamazaki area just south of Kyoto. Eric and I arrived early for the tour, so we wandered a bit.

A public road bisects the distillery campus, and while the road then turns 90° to wrap up behind and beyond the campus, the logical straight-ahead continuation brings you to Shiio Shrine, apparently on Suntory property.

The public road heads off to the right, pitching up sharply (~15% grade). It looked inviting to cycle, so I came back later by bicycle to poke around. I also [...]