I did a little photoshoot today with recent MBA graduates Taran and Kate, doing some traveling before heading into the workforce.

I'm out of practice of late, but they had such nice smiles and an easy-going nature, so it was a breeze. I've a bazillion photos to get through... for the moment, here are a few.

I'll post more later, but for today, I'll end with this wigglegram:

Continued here...

Sorry for not posting anything recently. I've felt remarkably unmotivated in all things lately, but found some inspiration in an email from someone asking about this mountain roller slide that I'd posted about some years ago. Now that I'm into cycling (though currently generally unmotivated about it), I thought I'd ride to the location to see whether it's still there.

Here's the ride:

Along the way I came across a lovely lotus field in the middle of the suburbs.

Next was to explore a short but steep (and nicely-paved) climb I'd seen here. It starts under a new expressway bridge...

Next was the main climb of the day, the full Yoshimine-dera Temple climb, ostensibly 3.6km (2.3 mi) at 10.2%, but the first kilometer is relatively mild, then it ramps up quickly.

Halfway through is a section of 450m at 17% that ends at the parking-lot entrance to the temple, but the actual road continues to wind up almost two dozen switchbacks:

I made a PR on the first half by a wide margin, but had to stop before plodding on to slowly finish the climb.

The temple itself, which I didn't visit on this trip, is quite nice, especially in the fall. It's been on my blog many times over the years, such as in “The Whole Gamut of My Blog In One Spectacular Visit to the Yoshiminedera Temple”

Anyway, I eventually made my way the remaining 12km to the location of the slide, which is in a small entertainment complex that includes the ability to pick your own mushrooms that you can have cooked there, or bring home. I opted to just stop in the cafe for curry:

The section with the slide is an area called “山びこの森”...

Cost is 210 yen (~$2) per person, though elementary-school aged and below are free. The photo above is taken pretty much at the little kiosk where you pay. A ticket is good for all day, in and out as you like.

Open every day but Tuesday.

Frankly, without a bazillion kids enjoying the area, it's sort of pathetic. There are a couple of teeter-totters, the slide, and the “Tarzan rope” mentioned here, and that's about it.

To ride the slide, first grab one of the pads lying around or in the shed near the bottom....

Climb the path to the top of the slide. It affords nice views of the slide as you go...

It takes some balance on the pad to get up any speed. Going slowly, it took me 30 seconds to get to the bottom, but with some seating adjustments it could go much more quickly, I think.

I'm not sure how much effort it's worth to try to visit this place, but it can be reached via bus from JR Takatsuki Station, though there are less than a dozen buses a day:

The left three columns show the schedule from the train station to the area, for (left to right) weekdays, Saturdays, and Sundays/holidays. The row number shows the hour of the day; a number within a box indicates the minute (in that hour) when the bus leaves, and in parenthesis, the bus's destination. For example, on weekdays, a bus leaves the train station at 1:15pm, headed toward 杉生. The bus before that is at 11:37, and the one after is 3:55.

There's a bus stop right at the complex, called “森林センター前”. It takes about 40 minutes in the bus.

The right-side three columns show the return buses to the train station. The last one on a weekday is 7:38pm

After leaving, I went to explore some new roads, and found some lovely ones, as well as one that had seen better days...

The first new road I tried, a long and lovely climb followed by a descent with many questionable sections of road, as seen above, joined civilization at a spot I'd ridden by in the past:

The rest of the ride was fairly uneventful. I was disappointed to find that a 10km section during the return trip, which had looked like a lovely descent on a big sweeping road, turned out to be quite unlovely because it cut through miles and miles of strip mining, and so the road surface had become horribly pitted from the thousands of dump trucks over the years, so it was decidedly unfun. To make it worse, there was a strong headwind filled with sand and gravel from the mining operations, so it was an uncomfortable struggle even going downhill.

This satellite view gives some sense of it. It's not a road I'll be trying again any time soon.

Closer to home, there's a lot of construction of some sort along the river... there were dozens of dump trucks visible at once. Here's where they were rejoining the road...

I had a pleasant evening yesterday, with a relaxing boat ride on the Katsura River, in the Arashiyama area of Kyoto. An elementary-school friend of Manseki was in town and invited Manseki, who in turn invited some friends, which included me.

I took the subway and tram across town. At the final station, there's a “Kimono Forest”, a small but well-done art installation...

I then met up with others at the boat dock for the two-hour ride...

Arashiyama's famous Togetsukyo bridge has been seen on my blog many times, including here here and here, but never quite from this angle. It's sort of out of focus in the background, with the haphazard posts in focus in the foreground lying in front of a small waterfall, to stop the errant boat from going over. Luckily, this was as close as we got.

A few years ago, this river flooded so high that the posts were submerged... five times over. The water crested the bridge. I blogged about it, and you can see a news video at the bottom of “A Bit More Rain in Kyoto Than Normal”

For the “shot” above I took a hand-held high-speed exposure-bracketed burst so that I could feed it to Lightroom's automatic HDR processing (via Library's “Photo > Photo Merge > HDR” command). It never ceases to amazing me what it can do with low-quality ingredients like this. I then took a heavy hand at some further processing, correcting the perspective distortion, removing the utility wires and such in the background, and removing a few manhole-cover like things that had been placed incongruously in the path.

For the most part I'm not a fan of HDR, because it's usually used too heavily, creating an unnatural result. It's effective here, though, to show the richness of the various kimono fabrics. It seems that I've used this technique for only one other blog post, on some shots in “Discovering Kyoto’s Wonderful Toji-in Temple on a Tour with NORU” a couple of years ago. (On the other hand, I sort of did some poor-man's HDR in “Exposing for Single-Shot HDR”.)

Yesterday there was a big crash at the end of Stage Four of the Tour de France, involving Peter Sagan and Mark Cavendish. Sagan was blamed, and then ejected from the rest of the three-week race.

My gripe is that half of the news articles I've seen today are just wildly inflammatory, using phrases that make for excellent click bait, but are devoid of fact.

First, let's look at what happened. Here's a view from the front. Peter Sagan has a green helmet and a white jersey with rainbow stripes on the sleeves. Mark Cavendish has the green bike and is the first to crash:

The video includes views from the front and from above.

What I saw when I watched it live is the same thing I see when I download it and carefully inspect it frame by frame: there was contact between the two (likely Sagan's hips and Cavendish's handlebars), upon which Cavendish started to go down. Sagan's elbow then made a seemingly-instinctual reaction, jutting out as if to dislodge a fly that had landed on it. Anyone actually looking at the video carefully can't possibly refute that the crash was already underway and a foregone conclusion before there was any movement from Sagan's elbow.

Furthermore, it seems clear to me that the arm/elbow didn't even touch Cavendish.

Despite the elbow having nothing to do with it, I do think it was Sagan's fault. I believe him when he says that he didn't know Mark was there, but it's his responsibility to know the space is clear before taking it. As much as I like Peter Sagan (he's my favorite pro cyclist by far), I think he was negligent in this case.

Anyway, major news outlets are reporting that “Sagan elbowed Cavendish”, which besides being factually incorrect, makes it sound intentional and malicious. For example, CBS Sports:

Cavendish, booted from Tour De France
"Sagan's elbow set off a nasty crash that left Cavendish bloody and Sagan disqualified"

How can one trust anything in the article when the headline and the lead are factually incorrect? There are a lot of articles like this.

There's misinformation on both sides. The 2nd video embedded just above purports to illustrate that Sagan wasn't at fault, totally ignoring the very-relevant seconds before the video starts. Cavendish was at least partially parallel with Sagan for a couple of seconds prior to contact, so he had a right to be there. He was holing a steady line as he accelerated and was in the process of passing Sagan when Sagan's drift with the bulk of the group brought him into the space that Cavendish already occupied.

It seems factual that nobody elbowed anyone, and reasonably clear that Sagan was negligent. What's not clear to me is what the punishment should be.

I would assume that punishment for this kind of infraction would be spelled out in the rules, applied within the context of what has traditionally been allowed and what has traditionally been considered “over the line”. Personally, I have little experience with this stuff so I'm not in a position to say what the punishment should be, but as much as I like Peter Sagan, I can't find myself too upset at his being ejected for a crash that ended the season of one of the sport's top talents.

A friend in Kyoto that I've known for years has recently opened a second location for her shop, Tea Ceremony Camellia, which offers tea-ceremony experiences in English. Her new location, Camellia GARDEN, is quite picturesque, and after many missed tries to get our schedules to converge, I was able to stop by for an hour the other day to try for some photos.

We didn't have any plan for any specific photos, and didn't have much time, so I just went for some of the low-hanging fruit, to help build ideas for a real photoshoot some day.

Here's a hastily-made wigglegram of the room:

I've become rusty with the camera so it was good to put it to use. With a bit more time and preparation I should be able to do much better than these, but that'll have to be another day...