Bottled water in a can, Nikko bicycle ride.

We stayed busy this week and weekend, but actually I don't have a lot of content.  Not so many pictures to share.  Kate had an activity with the UCIA (Utsunomiya Center International Association), and I was invited to ride my bicycle from Utsunomiya to the lake at Nikko.  The ride was just a method of transportation to get to a campground that others from work would stay at.  About 30 people went to the camp ground, but only 4 went by bicycle (Maeshima san, Ito san, Kanegae san, and me.) I didn't want to stay away from the family for the night so I decided to go and ride back the same day.  Riding back made the round trip total about 90 miles with a lot of climbing.  

     A number of weeks ago I went on a bike ride around Takanezawa and got lost.  Eventually I found a familiar road and made it home but after that ride, I started looking at GPS units for bicycles.  I was informed by Maeshima san that parts could be ordered from England cheaply due to the exchange rate and shipping was free.  Before the ride we both ended up getting a Garmin for bicycles.  There are many cool features contained in it, one of which is route planning.  The picture below is the planned route for the ride.

You can see on the map we had 5,407 ft of climbing to get to the camp.  On the way to Nikko we had to ride up Irohazaka.  That portion was the most challenging.  Some parts of Irohazaka are at 10 percent slope.  The average is 5 percent on the climb.

This is an image of Irohazaka from a previous trip.

The Garmin tracks a number of things that can be analyzed later.  Below is some of the information from the actual ride overlaid with the map.

Here is an image of the Garmin unit.

This Garmin is compact.  The internal battery lasts around 15 hrs so it is great for riding.  Since I knew we were going to do a lot of climbing I wanted to keep weight down.  As a result I did not take my camera, hence the lack of pictures.  I was able to snap a few from my cell phone (I considered it an emergency device so I took it along).  The first one shows the size of the GPS.

Here is Maeshima leading the pack.

Ito san and Kanegae san.

Some of the other campers took pictures as they passed in their cars, so I am hoping next week I can post a few of them.  The ride home took a little less than 3 hrs.  I used quite a bit of my brake pads going down Irohazaka.  During the decent a bus was going down the road and had about 30 cars were backed up behind it.  I was able to work my way around all the cars and finally the bus after about 4 corners.  From there until the bottom I saw no other cars.  I topped out at just under 40 mph.  To many sharp corners to go flat out, and there was a light rain so the roads were a little slippery.  Below is more data from the Garmin.  You can see the time it took to get to the base of the climb verses the main climb itself.  Overlaid is heart rate so it is easy to see when the effort picks up.  I made it home considerably quicker than going and the heart rate is high the entire trip home.

This week while at the grocery store we found cans of bottled water?  I had to buy at least one.  The canned bottled water tasted like bottled bottled water.  It did feel a little strange to drink the water out of a can, otherwise just like bottled water.

Another funny thing I saw a while back was a toilet (not urinal type).  Why was it funny, well there was no door on it, and the person that calculated the size for the blinder did the math wrong.  If you decided to use it, anyone walking buy could watch you.  I suppose in an emergency it would be better than squatting in the middle of the street?

Finally for this week.  Ever wonder what a tea farm looks like?  Below is a picture of one.  Yokoyama san pointed this one out on our way to the fish market months ago.  I never would have know it was a farm if he would not have pointed it out to me. 

Thats all for this post, have a good week.