We're ready for our Fall bike trip

It's been quite a while since the last post. I guess there haven't been that much to write about. I've been riding my bike around daily, but haven't been on any epic rides to write about. The weather here has been quite strange. We had a super hot Summer here and then in a matter of a few days, the temperature had dropped like 10 degrees(celcius) and it felt like we skipped fall altogether and gone straight to Winter. That didn't last too long fortunately and now it's neither too hot or too cold, just about perfect weather for bike riding.

We are actually going on a "long ride" by our standards tomorrow. We are going to Hakone and spend a night at a hot springs inn and ride back the next day. Hakone is the first real mountain on the coast from Tokyo to Osaka. We're actually going to Hakone Yumoto which is at the foot of Hakone, so we won't really be climbing up the mountain. It is a long ride compared to what we'd been riding, but there are plenty of people who would ride from Tokyo to Hakone and back all in a single day. We're not one of those people. We're just gonna enjoy a long ride at a leisurely pace and then enjoy a hot bath and some good food. You all know what I'm talking about if you'd ever been to an Onsen in Japan.

The picture at the top is Kao with her bike. We got some slightly fatter tires for it. Kao says that the bike with these 700 x 28 Panasonic Pasella tires are so much more stable and easier to ride.



I put the tires backwards as some of you may have noticed, but that's been corrected. I also got the Ostrich pannier bags for my bike as we'll need to carry more stuff than usual for an overnight stay. These ones aren't those nice canvas bags, but the ones made of nylon that's a lot more reasonably priced. They seem a little more flimsy than my Minnehaha bag, but we'll see how they'll work out.. I didn't get any pictures of them, but I'm sure we'll take a lot of pictures on this trip.

I'll leave you with this picture of a miraculous encounter I had with a fairy on the Fujisawa-Yamato cycling road.