Today on a ride from Kyoto to Osaka Castle with Paul Barr, early on the trip while still in Kyoto we came across some cherry blossoms that had apparently gotten confused by the cold spell in October followed by a warm spell earlier this month... they seem to be blooming five months early!

Some varieties of cherry do normally bloom in November, such as we've over the years here, here, and here, but their branches are sparsely populated with blossoms. Today's were full:

今日の出会った桜は十月桜ではないだと思いますが、どんな種類のは分からない。実は、梅や桃ではかも知れません。

Whatever they were, they were pretty and out of place.

I made a short video of the blossoms, amid a ridiculous wind.

I've been meaning to write about a nice little solo ride I had two weeks ago, to the Ochiba Jinja shrine. It's the same place that I wrote about in “Great Day in Kyoto’s Colorful Northern Mountains”, which actually happened the next day.

The course for this day's solo ride can be seen on my cycling heatmap.

The fall colors had been pretty subdued, but with my health back after six weeks of colds/allergy/something, everything looked beautiful to me.

The small sign pointed up what looked like a driveway, but turned out to be an old logging road. I probably shouldn't have taken it on my road bike, but I tend to throw that kind of caution to the wind and just do it, so I just did it.

At first is was very rough/broken pavement, but then it smoothed out...

It was about 1.4km at 9.5% of increasingly rough road, mostly gravel of some sort. It'd be great on a mountain bike or even my Trek cross bike, but it was no place for a road bike with dainty tires.

Returning the way I came, I had to go very slowly due to the combination of rough road and steepness, and found that my wrists hurt a lot. After a while I couldn't stand it, and intended to stop to rest my wrists and almost fell over because I suddenly couldn't unclip my foot from the pedal! (You'll recall that I had a lot of trepidation about riding clipped in, but that I also quickly got used to it.)

Luckily I was able to switch my weight over and unclip with the other side. I soon realized the source of my problem:

I had somehow lost two of the three bolts that hold the clips to the shoe! This allowed the clip to swivel, making it impossible to unclip without dislocating my knee or dismounting. I was in a bit of a pickle until I got the idea of moving one of the three bolts over from the other shoe. Luckily I had a multifunction tool with an appropriate hex wrench.

I then continued down almost back to the main road, until I stopped here:

Having faced much worse with my first flat, I put what I learned in its aftermath to good use, shoving a thick foil cookie wrapper between the new tube and the split in the tire, to stop the tube from squeezing out and bursting.

With the tire patched up well enough, I continued my ride. I had a second spare tube and a patch kit I could still use on the first tube, should I need it.

I was in an exploring mood, so took the time to stop on a bridge I often go over for a photo looking down...

Being in an exploring mood, I found the old side road that went down there and took a photo looking back up...

I took the side road for quite a while, until it got sufficiently bumpy to have me worry about the tire, so I left the full exploration of it for another day.

Then I continued north for another 10 minutes and I was at the Ochiba Jinja shrine...

Clicking on any of the “nearby photos” links brings photos from years past.

I headed back home amidst the autumn late-afternoon light. The view over the Kamo River back close to home was crisk:

This was all 16 days ago (Nov 10). I went to the same shrine again today (Nov 26) with Paul Barr, by car, and found it to be in quite a different condition.

Continued here...

I've ridden my bike to Osaka three times so far. The first time was this ride in June; I'm using photos from that ride on today's post.

The second time was last month with a non-Cycling friend, and the third was yesterday, by myself.

A drunk man in the train knocked Anthony's phone to the ground, smashing its screen. Anthony being a kid, and the drunk man being a drunk man, Anthony felt he could do nothing but suck it up. Part of sucking it up means visiting the closest Apple Store to have the screen replaced, so I took the opportunity to make a ride of it.

There was little wind for most of the ride down, and few people were out on the path, so I could make good time. It took a bit over two hours (2:03) to make the 52km (32mi) trip, which seemed fast to me, so I expected that I would have made new PRs (personal records) on all the segments of the trip down.

I didn't. After returning home, checking the data for the ride on Strava revealed that I had been faster that first time in June, when I was weaker, had less experience, was stopping for photos, and had a heavier bike. This made no sense to me.

Then I thought about the wind. On that first trip, Manseki had mentioned that we had a nice tailwind that made the ride easier. I hadn't noticed it. One certainly notices a headwind or a crosswind, and they just sap the energy from you, but I didn't have the experience to realize how much of a benefit I got from the tailwind.

It turns out that I the benefit was huge... bigger than all the advances I've made in my riding (and my bike) since then.

I have ample experience with the pain of headwinds, which just suck the energy from you like a vacuum set to turbo mode. For example, last month's 200km speed trial around Lake Biwa had horrible gusty crosswinds for most of the trip. Every time a big truck passed me, I thanked it for the momentary respite from the wind, a respite that felt like the hand of God came by to give me a little shove. In the end I made the 180km (112mi) circumnavigation in 6:10, but if the wind had been calm I feel it would have been noticeably faster (or, at least, noticeably easier).

While Apple worked on Anthony's iPhone, I tooled around Osaka city a bit, and amused myself with a short little hill that I was able to get 7th-best on. That I could get anything close to an overall top-10 told me that no serious riders had ever given it a serious go while using Strava, but it's still nice to rank.

I actually thought I would have gotten the #2 position based on my own software running on my phone, which displayed my time for the segment in real time; it said I'd done one of the attempts in 31 seconds. Oh well, nothing's ever exact with GPS anyway.

I eventually returned to Apple and waited until the appointed time for the repair to be done, and they apparently waited too because when the time came, they told me they couldn't repair it. (Why didn't they just tell me when they found out, instead of waiting two hours?) I had to end up paying for a new phone. )-:

I'm happy the ride down to Osaka yesterday didn't have a headwind, but the wind kicked up as I approached Osaka, and got very gusty for the rest of the day. Some screenshots from www.windyty.com:

Unfortunately, my chosen route home through the mountains north of Osaka would first require an hour and a half of city riding directly into the wind.

The goal in heading north from Osaka was to do the climb to the top of Mt. Myoken (妙見山). We had to abandon that for lack of time before, and I worried that I'd have to do the same yesterday, with the iPhone repair having taken so long and the sun setting so much earlier, but I was able to make it. I didn't spend the time to walk up the steps to the lookout platform — I didn't have my camera with me anyway — and so I headed East to hightail it home.

Having left the house at 7am and expecting to be home long before dark at 5pm, I didn't even think to bring my so-I-can-see light. I did have so others can see me lights on both the front and rear, but they aren't enough to take some of the steep descents on the way home in the dark.

Luckily, I made it down and into the city before dark, though it was well dark by the time I got home around 6pm.

I was a lot more tired last night than I thought I should be, but then I realized today that it was my longest ride that didn't go around Lake Biwa. Here it is on my cycling heatmap.

The ride bumped my Eddington Number up to 35.

On a visit to the Enkoji Temple in northeast Kyoto yesterday, this couple in traditional kimono kindly posed for a wigglegram:

Anyone wearing kimono in these settings is certainly noticed by the camera, and it turns out that my camera had noticed her earlier, lost in thought in the main garden-viewing room...

This was part of Day 2 of Paul Barr's visit to Kyoto, which I'll write more about later. Day 1 was a visit to the Tenjuan Temple.

Continued here and here (sort of)

Paul Barr, in town this week, and I made a visit yesterday to the Tenjuan Temple (天授庵) within the Nanzen Temple complex. It was my second visit inside, my first visit here having been three years ago. Earlier this year, though, I did feature the main gate of this shrine covered in snow.

Anyway, the fall colors this year in Kyoto seem a bit subdued, but it wasn't crowded yesterday and overall was really pleasant. We ended up sitting and enjoying more than taking photos.

友達ポールさんは来日して、一緒に天授庵行って、もみじを撮影しました。今年は色は薄い方ですが、雰囲気はなかなか良かった。よく落ち着いて、リラックス出来ました。

With the dark shadows under the overhang, and bright sunlight in the background, the scene wasn't an appropriate one to try to get everything in, but I did a three-burst exposure-bracket sequence. Even though it was handheld, Lightroom's HDR-merge could handle it perfectly. However, the result was little changed from the middle source image, but with the added latitude I could then perform “single-frame HDR” to get a result that includes detail in both dark and bright areas, but the result just feels fake.

I can't believe it's been three years since I made “Elegance in Kyoto’s Tenjyuan Garden” at this spot, one of my first wigglegrams. It feels like it was just last year.

I made a similar wigglegram yesterday, being lucky enough to come across two ladies willing to pose:

It's been a while since I took a wigglegram, and it shows in how unsmooth my movement was, but my auto-align software was able to recover some sense of smoothness.

Even though I was right there in real life, the photo above gives me no sense for the size of the stones, so when going through my photos, this next image sort of surprised me...

The crowds were not oppressive, so it was thoroughly enjoyable to be lazy, take our time, stop often to chat, etc. “Pleasant” was the theme of the day.

And speaking of “pleasant”, we capped off the day with chicken and suds at Uroko (which I had been to just the other day with Carlin)...