This weekend.

Bikes were ridden, beer was drunk, rubbish was talked (especially after beer) and a lot of fun was had.

How much fun? How's this pic for an answer?
Aki grinding out a tough climb on his sweet monster-truck of a SS:
One of the only other good riding pics I got (too much fun again to stop on the 'fun' bits and take pics - I'm a bike geek not a photo geek...). Coming up a short, steep hill is Aki, followed by Legs-macho (you should see them!) and Megumi aka The Trail Ninja.
Great weather, great people, great place.

Great Weekend. I'm shattered.

Sunday Road Ride

Felt like I hadn't ridden the road bike in a bit, and wasn't all that chipper this morning (i.e. not up to the intensity of MTB) so I decided to do a long, slow road ride today.

Rolled out the door, up along the Yahagi River (features in most of the photos/ maps from the 1000km of August). Headed for Yahagi Dam, about 35km from home, a nice very easy gradient the whole way.

I took my camera, and am glad I did as the colours were specktaklyer. In fact I think I wasted almost an hour of the ride taking photos, and got a few good ones. My little camera is capable of taking nice pics, it just has its limitations (in particluar coping with mixed light), so I'll only post the ones that came out really nicely.

This one in particular, at the turn-around bridge up above the dam is one of the better photos I've taken in a while.
The maples are pretty colourful right now too.
Spying on my bike during my lunch break.
I found this old house along the way - very decrepit and abandoned now, but once upon a time someone had repapered the screens with newspaper. Seen muuuch better days, and not the clearest of photos, but I thought it was worth snapping.
All in all a nice cruisy 80km with lots of photo stops. Legs are feeling it now, but the head is clear.

Bikes are fun.

1/4

of the way to becoming licenced-to-teach!

This just in: Final grade came in for the semester - and I passed!

One subject reflects the fact that for the last assignment, knowing I only needed 3/40, I didn't give it my best, but I still got a pretty decent overall mark.

I am a bit disappointed now that I didn't work a bit more on that last assignment, it's not my style to hand in half-baked assessment - to be honest though, I actually got more for it than I expected!

only six subjects to go, and I'm feeling that getting through them won't be so hard after all. Looking forward to it. If only I didn't have to wait three months to pick it up again...

Rolling through the weekends.

Alas, another comes to a close. I had a quiet time this weekend as I've still not managed to get back to 100% healthy. It may be the extreme low humidity, I dunno, but the latest trick is to go to sleep nice and easily, then wake up at 3:30AM - sometimes sneezing madly (if so, usually lasts for about an hour). Anyway, enough about that, as I was well enough to pedal, so pedal I did.

Saturday I headed to Hasso, in Inuyama, old MTB stomping grounds. Last time I was here the main 'warming up' trail was closed due to bridges broken by flooding, but today it was open, and I could get in and see what the damage was.
Yeah, it was pretty severe. This is, or was, over a really tiny creek, with a very small catchment area. I just can't imagine the rain that must have fallen to send enough water down the creek to do this. Some readers have ridden this and the other bridges - you'll know what I'm talking about!
This one almost survived. Of the eight in this little two kilometer stretch of trail, only one wasn't rendered completed useless, and some were just gone. I don't know where, as I'd ridden up past where they could have, or should have been lodged.
Even the stone bridges were annihilated. This one was well done, but this one really left me flabbergasted:
This concrete slab with ROCKS imbedded in it is about half the size of a car. Using my materials chemistry training I've calculated its' weight at a bloody lot, AND it was embedded in the ground. The water still managed to push it more than ten meters downstream! I'd have loved to see how much water it took to do that.

I eventually got around or past all the bridge remnants, and onto the real trail, but as usual it was too much fun to stop and take many pictures. I did get this one, it was near the top of a hill, so stopping was actually quite OK:
That led to a ripsnorter of a downhill trail where I rode the best I have in a long time, it was fuuu-uuun! My bike and I were in the zone, man it's fun to be a bike geek. At the bottom of said 'perfect trail' I found this:This waterfall shares the name of the area - Hasso. I'd been coming here to ride for nine years before I made it in to see it - glad I did! Hasso falls is beautiful, this spot, and indeed the whole area left me wishing for a bigger, fancier camera to take advantage of all the beautiful autumn colours.

After the ride, I visited a bike shop (another place that goes riiiight the way back to my first few months, or less! in Japan, and splurged on a new tyre. Man, this is living!

Been waffling on for a while now, and haven't gotten to Sunday, so I think I'll leave that for tomorrow, but today I rode the same place as last week, found a great new trail that I wished I'd explored the first time I saw it almost 18 months ago (better late than never...) and where last week this happened when I caught some phat air over a nice little rock:
Handlebars slipped and rotated down - was quite a weird feeling!

One of Those Rides.

Yesterday was the first day in a couple of weekends where I'd felt well enough to ride the MTB. Still perhaps a bit early, but I needed to ride. Heading up the the usual spot, the air was cool - upon leaving the car at 12noon it was only 16 degrees, the maximum for the day. Sunshine made it pleasant, though.
Colours are changing - yellow for now.


My bike taking a breather before the ascent of the last pitch (in the background). STIL (steeper than it looks...honest)


Pretty. I swear I wouldn't be too surprised to see Bilbo and Frodo ambling along here, except if they were speaking Japanese.


More colours - I like this photo. Nothing special, but the colours are fairly true to real life - it was sunny, warm and perfect.

As usual it was too much fun coming down to stop and take photos, sorry. In consolation here's a half-arsed pano of the little valley in which I parked.

A few more words tomorrow about this ride, it'll be more of a bike-geek thing, so be forewarned...

And now for the eight o'clock news.

This just in - I keep being pleasantly surprised by my Uni results - another great result today. I wish I could trade some of these wasted marks for future grades though...

Public holiday here tomorrow, it's going to be a perfect autumn day. Here's to hoping I'm well enough to ride.

In other news, day two of NO SHAVE NOVEMBER has passed successfully. Only a few more until the itching starts to kick in, then we'll see what I'm made of. I have a feeling NSN might be harder than the 1000km of August...