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

I also did a three day trip but took my other road bike as I didn't feel like taking it seriously, I just brought a backpack and left it in train station lockers while I was doing the real riding.

I rode from Kyoto and then around lake Biwa (still convinced this is actually the sea, it's massive). I was going to go all around the whole thing but it was unseasonably cold and I got snowed and hailed on so I just did the bits I wanted to see and went back before it got late and even colder.

The first picture is what happens when you believe ridewithgps and a security guard who said it would be ok and then have to carry your bike down a steep muddy hill in the middle of a forest.
The second picture is what happens when the area around is completely flat for miles and miles but your disturbed cyclist brain makes you ride up the one hill there is.

Then I rode to Nara and did a loop I plotted around the area to look at a lot of the old burial mounds, or as I realized and thought a lot about while riding, to look at where important dead people tried to show they were important even after they were dead.

I like poetry from the era when the capital was here and I wanted to see the land where these people lived, but thinking about the power structures of the time made me realize that a lot of them where probably dicks much like the people in charge of us now, and I've stopped romanticizing the period so much.
It was still very moving for me to photograph my bike in front of this site where one of the palaces was and to look at the same hills and sky and land that helped inspire people to make such lovely words hundreds and hundreds of years ago.

Two poets I like were active around this time and although they lived their lives as important and powerful people they both seem to have shared a similar, if rather differently expressed, outlook on life that makes be believe they would not have cared much for the systems they lived and we live under. I think the real poets were still first and foremost, poets.

なかなかに人とあらずは酒壷に成りにてしかも酒に染みなむ
I'm such a fuck-up, I wish I could just be a wine bottle instead. Ah, fuck it, let's drink.

世の中を何に譬へむ朝開き漕ぎ去にし船の跡なきごとし
Describe the world. A boat rows away at dawn. It leaves no trace.

I had the last line of the second poem written on my top tube but it's already worn away, lol

Anyway that's my blog on what I thought about while pedaling my bike.
The weather was shit on the third day so I didn't even bother to ride, I just had a drink with the deer and took the slow train home.