Bicycle: 110 km
Train: 250 km
Total ascent: 1078 m
Average speed: 17.4 km/h
Riding time: 6:30 h
Weather: sunny and warm (for being November), 18 C
As I was already halfway up the mountain I decided to continue going up through the ski slopes.
The road had very little traffic. I think there were more cross-country skiers that overtook me than cars. And overtake they did at a speed so fast I didn’t have time to get a good picture. A bit later another smaller group arrived and I was prepared and got them on video but they were nowhere as fast as the first group. Not sure if they were the Olympic squad or something like that.
I however stopped a few times during the ascent to take pictures, enjoy the scenery and catch my breath.
When I arrived at “the top” (it wasn’t really the top but the place from where a road descends to the valley), I decided to continue just a little bit more before turning and going downhill. From the map I thought that this road was a bit larger than the one I had come up from Nozawa but it was even smaller, and from tomorrow until end of May (!) will be closed for the winter. A bit early maybe considering how warm it was even on top today. There was so little traffic that on the entire downhill I only met 1 car and 1 motorcycle. The gradient of the descent was also good I did break a lot, but still doable. And not too many curves.
The topic of little traffic surprisingly continued down in the valley thanks to two roads on both sides of the river. One with and one (nearly ) without traffic.
Many varied roads and most of them with nearly no traffic! What a treat!
While I am writing this I am sitting in the Shinkansen back to Tokyo. This being a long weekend, the shinkansen were really full. There were no more reserved seats on any shinkansen (which is fine by me as I prefer non-reserved)... but in such circumstances this also means that the non-reserved section will be really full. So well, I lined up at the unreserved car. The first Shinkansen that came was already full, but still a lot of people squeezed in. So many that they needed to apply the "backwards entering technique" you see so frequently with commuter trains in Tokyo. I waited for the next one, an "Asama" shinkansen, which starts in Nagano, so I was assured a seat and a cozy spot for the bike behind the last row. Surprisingly this shinkansen did not get overcrowded, not even in Karuizawa where I have often seen the Shinkansen to have standing space only.
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