Bicycle: 83 km
Train: 250 km
Average speed: 16,6 km/h
Total ascent: 1135 m
Riding time: 5:15 h
Weather: a bit of everything (except snow), 13 C
For the last day of this very long weekend I made yesterday two different plans:
- Plan A: ride up to the gondola for Sora terrace. Apparently a place where one can often see a sea of clouds. But not today… thanks to their live feed on YouTube I could check and it was within the clouds for the entire day.
- Plan B: ride (again) to Lake Nojiri. Again because I had been here about a year ago already and really liked the lake, the landscape and the small villages.
In the morning it was still raining at the hight of my Minshuku but by the time I was ready to leave the rain has stopped. But streets were still damp. It was a leisurely ride downhill. Not too steep and mostly on very quiet roads.
On the other side of the broad and very fertile valley I made it up the hills on a road that was so quiet that hardly any car passed but still it was a wide road. A few small villages thrown into the landscape. All apparently with minimal services only.
I don’t think I saw a single restaurant anywhere. But I knew that this wouldn’t be a problem because the lake itself is a bit touristic. Low key, but touristic for local people to enjoy fishing, water sports…
I had phoned ahead to see if a small restaurant was open, and it was. Riding there it started to rain lightly, nothing to worry too much about. But about 1 min after arriving and sitting in the warm room , rain started to pour down. While I ate my Curry rice and an extremely tasty tomato salad (of local tomatoes), the rain stopped and even a shy sun was making some intermittent appearance.
While riding around the lake I had a feeling like there was something wrong with my rear wheel. And there was. The wheel had lost most of its air. I tried pumping it up with my small pump, but either that pump is so small that only microscopic amounts of air enter or I did something wrong, it didn’t seem that the wheel was gaining any air. So I continued riding carefully until the next village along the lake where I asked at a few watersport shops and the third one (that was actually closed) I found a bike pump. With that proper pump I managed to pump it up. It seemed that it was leaking air from a lot of microscopic holes on the side of the tire. But I checked during my ride (there would have been the opportunity to take a train back to Nagano) and it seemed that the air was now holding. Will need to observe that. The tire is less than a week old and tubeless.
No comments:
Post a Comment