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hello everyone — happy saturday. I am typing this sitting next to the wood stove sipping coffee waiting for it to warm up so I can go for a ride. what better time to blog a blog that I meant to do during my last Japan visit nearly 2 years ago now. so here you go back in time with me!

April 2023: Pat and I fly to Osaka for our 2nd Panaracer factory meeting for ultradynamico. that is patz with the blue hat if you didn’t know. after our meetings in Osaka we met up with our friend Akira for some shop visits around Osaka and general hangs. Akira loves to hang.

Akira took us around on some nice sport walks to a number of fun cafe’s and bike and camera shops. all three are seemingly everywhere. we had a lot of coffee.

We visited the Shimano museum which was pretty fun. I bet a sram museum would suck. we also got to have dinner in a few homes of some very nice bike people. we communicate with body language and smiling at bikes.

then its on the train to Nagoya to visit our friends at Circles (sim works). did not take long to skip over to another city via bullet train (that photo isn’t a bullet train, I know). patz and I did not take bikes on this trip, just our backpacks. we knew we’d be walking a lot (10 plus miles a day as it turned out), and honestly bringing our bikes here last time was a huge hassle since we seem to only ever get to roam around cities on these buisness trips — so all the rinko’ing of our huge 60-62cm bikes takes it’s toll on your sanity. plus Blue Lug had bikes our size waiting for us in Tokyo to get around on.

Nagoya is a nice size. walkable and does not seem toooooo overwhelming. still a huge city by my standards. sorry I don’t have any photos inside circles for whatever reason. its a must stop Japan bike shop though! one of the best in the world.

we stayed in a trad Japanese cottage that night. you sleep on those mats on the floor. takes some getting used to, but we were so tired that we did not really need to get used to much.

the next day we were onto the train again to Shaguza to visit Mamiya of Stomplox. our first in person meeting after video calling for 4 years. we went over some stuff for the now nearly finished with production trail worm, and had a “tex mex” lunch. it was good!

then we bullet trained to Tokyo at 200mph to meet up with our friends at Blue Lug. We’d be staying with blue lug a few days, and they had our time pretty well mapped out. I don’t mind!

our first day in Tokyo was spend visiting the various Blue Lug locations of which there are 5? we had folks waiting for us at each shop — and they were having Patz sign anything in sight. you just don’t get this fun in the US. kids too! he was like a major league pitcher walking into the megadome.

while at the blue lug visits I took it upon myself to document all of the employee bikes that I could. i posted all of those on the radavist here, if you are curious.

Blue Lug then took us on a few bike rides around a city that is so vast, it defies description. Tokyo is indeed the the largest urban area in the world. everywhere you can see … even from our hotel on the 50th floor … is Tokyo.

okay next post will be our visit to the Hanjo Fender factory!

XORR