rose-colored glasses

It's been a long time since I've posted about a bike ride, since it's been a long time since I've taken a bike ride, but today I did and so here's a short post about it.

The weather's been beautiful--cold, crisp autumn days--but beautiful-as-viewed-from-the-train-during-my-commute and beautiful-on-the-bike are two different things. In other words, it's cold!! Before I dump three hundred bucks into a full winter gear kit, I thought I'd see what I could put together with what I had around the house. I pulled out my ski long underwear and the old Mapei winter jersey, and Tomo tossed in her leg warmers, which I thought made me look kind of sexy but she thought made me look just plain goofy. In the end it was a decent set of clothes, performance-wise, though my finger tips and ears were FREEZING for the first twenty kilometers or so. I'll have to get my ski gloves from Hokkaido, and ask Dad to send me the Cannondale headband I was going to bring back with me this summer but seem to have forgotten. But I still may have to spend a little money to be warm enough to ride if I'm going to keep going out. There was still a bit of fall in the air today. Soon it will be all winter.

The ride itself was just a leisurely cruise through the flat lands between Mt. Tsukuba and Kasumigaura, Japan's second largest lake. The crops are all harvested and the fields are settling down for winter. The leaves on the trees are turning and I just kept thinking how beautiful it all was. Then I realized that it was especially beautiful because I was looking at it through rose-colored glasses. Not in the sense of seeing the land at rest rather than barren, but literally through rose-colored sunglasses that made everything a little more vibrant than it might have otherwise been. I didn't notice it so much in the summer, but something about the autumn colors really looked good. Thanks to the kind folks at Briko for a fine day!