The same meetup group with whom I went to Kasumigaura a few weeks back, announced an other ride to Kumagaya along the Arakawa river for some hanami. I know that those guys are fast. Crazy fast... but they claimed for this ride that intermediate riders would be okay, and it was a flat ride plus, worst case, I could just drop.
We met at a conbini close to Arakawa river and set off. As always with this group, only road cyclists, mainly young men, a crazy fast German lady and then there was me. But all nice.
When entering Arakawa river we were greeted by Shibazakura (phlox moss in English... but Shibazakura, i.e. grass cherry blossoms just makes so much more sense):
And then we cycled up Arakawa river. This river probably has the best cycling road around Tokyo... broad, well paved, not too many pedestrians... but it is a heavily dammed river in an otherwise built up area, so not really nice. But you can get to nice places from there. Only that from my house cycling all the way to Arakawa is a long (20+ km ride) just to be on a cycling highway. But today there was the goal of sakura in Kumagaya.
I had no idea that this spot in Kumagaya existed, and it turned out that the organizer only knew, because she had bought what she thought was a normal map of Japan, but turned out to be a map where you "need" to scratch open sightseeing spots that you have been to. And apparently there isn't that much to see in Saitama (really?) that this Hanami spot made it on the list.
Along the way out and back again, we stopped at a farm with ice factory. This has become quite a thing in Japan (I don't remember seeing that a few years ago (between 2015 and 2017 when I last was living in Japan), but now it is quite a thing. Farms selling their own ice cream.
But the main attraction of the day were the sakura and rape, skillfully planted together and blooming at the same time.
On the way back the rest of the team road all the way to Tokyo on Arakawa, but I wanted to cycle home and not need to rinko, and cycling all the way back to Tokyo would have brought me to the wrong side of the city. I knew from a ride with my NPC cycling friends last year in December a good road from Akigase park to Shibuya area of Tokyo, so thanks to komoot and Strava I found the route, reprogrammed it and dropped off at Akigase to cycle back home all the way.
Curiously on the very next day (I am writing this blog post many months later, while lying in my hammock in my garden on a not too hot summer evening), I was again in this very same area, riding back the very same road from Akigase to Tokyo. This time riding at a good speed in order to get home in time to bake a cake for one of my friends who had her birthday on that day.
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