Bicycle: 64 km
Total Ascent: 68 m
Average Speed: 19.8 km/h
Riding Time: 3:12 h
Weather: Some sun, some clouds and some lakes on the cycling road, 17 C
My first Golden Week since moving back to Japan last year. Company is closed for a full 10 days! When I organised this years GW, I wasn’t specially inspired where to go, so instead of making some complicated plans, I just decided to come an entire week to Kyoto, bring the bike and do cycling trips from here. While it is nice to cycle from A to B, it also means that you have to bring all the luggage on the bike. And although I am now quite skilled in brining not that much luggage, it is still luggage. And riding a road bike without luggage is just more fun. Plus I kind of knew that I would need to bring my work computer with me… and I definitely do not want to log that thing around on a bike. So instead I booked some weeks ago a hotel in Kyoto, again South of the station in an area that is pretty non descript, but turned out to be very convenient for me as a cyclist. Not only is it very close to the entrance of a cycle path along the Kamogawa river, but it also has a sento (albeit no rotenburo). For the normal tourist the place might not be that convenient… but ain’t no normal tourist.
An other first was to reserve my Shinkansen ticket on the EX app and link it to my pasmo card… and while I did struggle a bit when doing the reservation, taking the train today was pretty easy. Just swipe over your pasmo card, and you are all set.
For the recent trip to Tohoku I had bought a new rinko bag (bag to transport legally a bicycle on a train in Japan) where both the front and rear wheel needs to be removed so that the bike becomes even smaller… but even so, it is still pretty big. So when the third person arrived who had resevered the luggage space behind the seats in the last row, one other person (who admittedly only had a rather small luggage in the storage area, needed to put his trunk overhead. He wasn’t too pleased. But his luggage was definitely the smallest of the 3 and did perfectly fit overhead.
I arrived at 12:00 at Kyoto station, then took a subway to my hotel (I didn’t dare to assemble the bike at the station), but instead assembled it calmly at the hotel.
I hadn’t made any special plan for today, also because the weather was kind of unclear. In the morning both in Tokyo and Kyoto it had rained, but until I came here it had stopped raining and even the sun every now and then came out. So as I hadn’t decided any fancy route, I just did a bit of Yodogawa cycling (I.e. along the river between Kyoto and Osaka) in memory of the good old times, when I was at Linical Osaka office for extended business trips and took my Brompton on the weekend to cycle around. Quite often Osaka - Kyoto. Specially in 2020, when Corona had just started. So in memory of these old times, I just cycled along the two rivers with a goal to start the return after about 2 hours… which resulted to be here:
Apart from some enormous puddles on the cycling road, the ride was relatively eventless.
For tomorrow I made more concrete plans… Let’s see if plan will become reality.
When I came back to Kyoto to my hotel, I noticed that some streets we’re closed for a shrnie festival. So I followed the lead, and quite close to Kyoto station I came up to one matsuri shrine being transported through the city. When I arrived I just saw it from behind being danced through the streets… but then around Kyoto station they only pushed it on its wheels. But still… nice. Not as nice as the typical matsuri in my neighbourhood. But okay and a good start into this GW.
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