Instead of writing up the full blog post about my visit the other day to Suntory's Yamazaki Distillery, I instead did a short bicycle ride to the area, to investigate all the short-but-steep roads nestled in where the city meets the mountain.

On the way, I went through the belly of the sprawling Yamazaki Junction, mentioned in a comment on the blog post where I featured photos of the rat's-nest Kumiyama Junction....

It's much more complex than the one I wrote about before, but much less photogenic...

It's more complex in that it includes an entrance and an exit that can be reached by either of the two expressways that cross. Looking at the area on the map is dizzying. But it's spread over a fairly wide area, and unlike the other junction I wrote about, a bicycle can't get to much of it. So from any one spot, you can see a few trees, but have no sense for the magnitude of the forest.

Oh, and one other things this junction has is a bus stop on the expressway. Passengers reach it from the normal surface roads:

Anyway, I continued over toward the small (but steep) mountain that Yamazaki nestles up against....

Once I reached the mountain, I skirted it and took every road that turned in toward the mountain. Many didn't go far, but some brought enjoyable surprises, such as a big temple...

I made a Strava segment for the 370m @ 11% climb, but it seems few folks have done it.

Near Suntory's distillery is something called the “Asahi Beer Oyamazaki Villa Museum of Art”. Asahi is a competitor of Suntory, and I assume that they put this thing nearby on purpose, and if so, it seems a bit slimy to me. The road up to the entrance is very steep, and past that it's even steeper as a service road to the rear of the site. It's just as well I wanted to do that steep service road, because as the signs at the entrance indicate multiple times, bicycles (and much else) aren't welcome.

Then it was time for the main climb I knew to be in the area, the short but steep climb to the Hoshakuji Temple (宝積寺) It averages 15.6% for its 350-meter length....

I tried to put in an effort, but it didn't feel like I was getting much out of it. My legs are weak from not having done this kind of powerful effort all winter. Normally it's my lungs that limit me, but this time it was my legs... at least until a trash truck didn't feel like sharing the road, and I had to stop to let him by. Really burst my bubble.

I didn't like that I was interfered with, so I turned around and did it again.

On the way down in between, I snapped a photo showing how high one gets in such a short distance:

Anyway, I got to the bottom, turned around, and did it again, sans trash truck.

Holy cow, the second time was so much worse than the first. My willpower just collapsed and I ended up barely inching forward toward the middle, or so it felt. But by the time I got near the top, the last few meters had me — and this was a first for me — almost throwing up. I guess the problem is that I attempted an effort that I could have done at the start of the winter, but not now at the end.

It had taken just two minutes, but I was wiped out to the core.

Once I got moving again, I was drained, so I took everything for the rest of the ride really easily.

I started poking around the mountain again.

In the center of the photo above, there's a narrow path going down; a woman and a toddler are walking up it. The path is so particular that I immediately recalled it from my commute by motorcycle, done most days between 1990 and 1995.

I also came across a preschool that I recall having gone past all the time, but this time I noticed a small street beside it pitching up the mountain, so I took it. It eventually entered the woods and got even steeper...

I made a segment for this climb as well, 450m @ 13%, but I'm the only one to have done it so far.

The smells from the distillery are heavenly, another thing I remember from the few seconds that I passed in front of the place on my daily commute 25 years ago. In particular, the steam emanating from this truck had a lovely rich smell that I just sat and took in for a bit...

The back road down to the distillery seemed to make a nice climb, so I retraced my steps and did it, then made it into a Strava segment. Overall it's a mild 500m @ 8%, but the first third is relatively flat, then the next third is about 12%.

My effort was 3rd-overall best.... out of four total. 🙂

Continuing around the mountain, I saw a side path go into a tunnel, so I took it...

It goes steeply up the mountain along the edge of a cemetery.

While poking around later, I came across the this monstrosity of a building:

The trip down from there seemed to make a natural climb, so as before, I turned around and did the climb back up, making yet another segment. This one is 750m (½ mile) at an overall average of 8%, but it keep getting steeper and steeper. The final bit behind the ugly building is on the order of 17%.

Finally it was time to head home.

On the way back, I stopped by Morning Glory for coffee and a sandwich...

I made my first visit in a long while to the Suntory Whisky Distillery down in Yamazaki today. I wrote about it five years ago in “Japan’s First Whisky: Suntory’s Yamazaki Distillery”.

The grounds also includes a “whisky museum”, which I wrote about at about the same time in “Suntory Yamazaki Distillery Photogenic Whisky Museum”.

To be continued...

Some photos from this ride that I did yesterday...

On the way out of the city, I swung by the Kitano Tenmangu Shrine to see their famous plum blossoms...

The Kitano Tenmangu Shrine is known for its plum blossoms (seen many times on my blog, such as here, here, and here), but is also richly photogenic in its own right.

I then headed over to Arashiyama and mountains west...

After taking the photo above, I realized that I'd never taken the road leading off to the left, so did.

A far cry from the first time I took in this view. But at least today there's a white-tailed deer, though it's almost impossible to find if you don't know exactly where to look... even harder than this find-the-deer shot from two weeks ago.

I ended up doing 1,850m (6,000') of vertical climb, which isn't all that much by my own standards — it ranks 43rd on my most-climb list — but it's the most in over two months, since this ride in December. So that's nice.

Here are some more photos of last week's Kyoto Marathon, which I posed about earlier in “Winning the Kyoto Marathon 2017 (Papa Division)”

After Elena passed, I went to another location to try to catch her again, where there's a turnaround so I could get a view of the runners coming directly at me.

Unfortunately, Police wouldn't let anyone linger at the one good viewing spot, despite it being the one spot anywhere nearby where a gathered crowd wouldn't inconvenience others. It made no sense, but it's just as well because it turns out that Elena had passed before I got there.

So, I moved to a spot a few minutes before the finish.

Despite having looked for the pace runners when I was at my initial location earlier in the day, I hadn't seen any until now. The two little balloons and the vest weren't as visually conspicuous as I remember from years past. She was right on pace, though... the folks around her with bib numbers all finished within 20 seconds of the 4:00:00 mark.

Everywhere near the finish line is off limits to non-runners, so I wandered over as close as I could get...

The big area in front of the gate was also off limits, for no apparent reason.

Right at the gate was a pathway for spectators, then on the other side of the gate was where runners emptied into after they finished.

This year's finish design seems egregiously unfriendly for the spectator or supporter. The design for the 2014 race was much better.

On a recent bicycle ride I was surprised to find myself passing the nearest Costco to Kyoto, about 25km (15mi) away. I was a member years ago, and mentally, it was a long way away, taking 45 minutes to drive there through traffic, with $15 of tolls along the way. Unfun. My driving geographic knowledge often never connects to my cycling geographic knowledge, so I'm surprised in this way often.

Anyway, I made a ride to Costco yesterday, explicitly to sign up for a membership and do some shopping. Manseki was going to be heading in the general direction, so we met up and rode with each other for the first while.

Not long after these photo ops, we went our separate ways, and I continued on for 15 more minutes to Costco.

As you can see in the shot above, I was wearing full cycling kit, which look really strange to those not accustomed to it, so to advertise that I was a cyclist (and hence explain the strange clothes), I kept my helmet on inside.

Inside looks like every other Costco on the planet.

Costco is both a blessing and a curse. If you need a 78-roll pack of toilet paper, it's great. If you don't need 78 rolls right this moment, it can be a curse because the low price in dollars (or yen) can blind you to the price in storage and logistics.

Shopping at Costco by bicycle means that I'm limited to what I can consume on site or carry home. I have to really think about each item. So no gazebo or fire pit for me today.

Some things can be consumed on site...

The main thing I wanted was the nuts, which I think is a better evening snack than more-junky things like popcorn and potato chips. (Omitting them altogether would be better still, but I'm mortal.)

I was surprised that I could fit ten of the big tubs of nuts into my backpack. 10! Each is 2,198 yen. I could get them delivered via Amazon Prime for 2,732 yen, meaning I'd save 534 yen each, or 5,340 yen ($47) just on this trip alone. That's more than enough to pay for the 4,400-yen yearly membership fee. Plus, I get a cycling ride out of it.

Unfortunately, I didn't quite save that much because I made a rookie Costco mistake: I didn't have quite enough cash. So I ended up having to leave one of the tubs of nuts at the register. Doh!

Since I wasn't pressed for time, I wandered around a bit in the area...

This building (or whatever it is) is visible from the highway, and is near the Costco. For the last decade I'd wondered what it was, having vaguely assumed it was some sort of religious building, but it turns out (if Google Maps it to be believed) that it's related to the municipal waterworks (a pumping station, reserve tank, or the like). Interesting.

The “#2 Keihan Expressway” connects southern Kyoto with Osaka in a fairly direct manner, and didn't exist 20 years ago. In fact, I wrote about the final parts of its construction nine years ago in A Kinki Drive: The No. 2 Keihan Expressway".

It's elevated for its entire 18-mile length, with a regular public-artery road built in parallel underneath that a bicycle can go on. A bicycle can also go on the minor parallel roads that flank the expressway/artery stack for much of the way, or the walking/cycling path that also parallels much of the way.

This rat's nest of bridges and tunnels is four unrelated layers of transportation:

1. Old, very minor surface roads providing farmers access to their fields.
2. Over them, Two new major city-connecting surface streets cross here.
3. Cycling roads on both sides of the two surface streets connect in an elevated cycleway that allows transfer among any of the eight cycling roads without stopping or interacting with any motor-vehicle traffic.
4. Floating above this all is a full all-direction interchange between two major expressways.

Just to keep things interesting, there's a river just north, and a creek just south.

The look in Google Earth is impressive:

It was fun to poke around this complex at my leisure. This part of the highway was completed perhaps 14 years ago. I actually mention it in my fifth-ever blog post 12 years ago.

When I was done, it was time to get back to the major trunk road, which at this point was at a level well above the surrounding ground:

I rode up the ramp and encountered the biggest problem with the heavy backpack: it's side-to-side movement as I chugged up the super-steep ramp almost threw me off balance. It was a dicey 10 seconds.

While crossing the Uji-River flood plain, we have three lines of transportation all next to each other at the same level. In the center are two lanes in each direction for the expressway. These are flanked by two lanes in each direction for the Route One Bypass. This is all flanked on the outer edges by cycling paths. It feels quite odd when they're all parallel at the same level, but once across the river, only the expressway lanes remain elevated.

I'd ridden by on the road at the base of the steps many times, but had never even noticed that there were steps leading up to the bridge, or thought much about what the road above might be. It was gratifying to add a new piece to my geographical puzzle.

I rode down the steep ramp, only to be surprised at the center pause that the ramp didn't continue for the last step, so the dropoff was unexpected. At least I was less surprised when the same thing happened at the very bottom as well.

Anyway, I was now retracing the first few kilometers of the ride. Here's another photo from the “Meeting Up with Manseki” location, but five hours later:

I may have to head back soon, to pick up a gazebo or two.