In Which I Attempt to Build a Sensible Road Bike + other bike content

~Bonus Content~

Here are some words and pictures about the rides that inspired this.
I did a four day trip with longish rides at the ends and two days off the bike in the middle.

Neither of them went as planned, possibly because I prepared for them mostly by reading Manyoshu poetry, whereas with hindsight I now realise I should have upped my mileage before and got a lot more practice doing long climbs. It was impossible to have known this at the time tho so I won't dwell on it.

As such I have decided to place the blame on the bike which I rode, and thus this thread.
If I could have carried more stuff, and/or, had a climbing gear without fitting a 36t cassette which I hate, it might have worked out differently.
Also I met a guy from New Zealand who was touring Japan in the most chill way possible, and, I thought his way sounded more fun actually. Hi Ben if you for some reason see this, that was a good talk we had.
(Ben is definitely not on here because he was not a massive nerd)

I started out in the middle of the night and took the easiest route through the mountains to save my legs. The night riding was quite interesting as I passed through a lot of weird desolate spaces on the outskirts of towns and by the side of major roads, in the most lonely time of the day.
I also rode among a shoal of lorries at 60km/h on the biggest road I ventured on, and then fully on the pavement at the top of the main climb after watching two guys in drift cars ahead of me start trying to push each other off the road and deciding I did not need to be in the same space as them.
I successfully timed everything so that I descended while it started to get light and saw Mt. Fuji appear to the side just as the sun came up.

After that I first rode along the coast for some time and then inland through tea fields and short punchy climbs. I passed the same cyclist multiple times due to doing a stupid windy route while he was going straight. Hopefully he didn't think I was fucking with him.

I got up the steepest bit (at walking pace, rendering the exercise pointless) but had to walk down part way on the other side. The woman running the shop at the top warned me that it was too sketchy to ride, and I assured here I would not go that way while internally realizing I had definitely planned my route that way.

I bailed and got a train at 280km into a planned 500km.
This was partly because the weather forecast was bad to the point I wasn't sure it would be safe to ride, and partly because the remaining distance was mostly boring suburbs and drinking a beer on the train and spending more time exploring my final destination seemed more fun than riding along flat straight roads in the rain.
I wanted to go a little farther but the trains didn't work out.