A Visit With Rick and Lily Hancock

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 24mm — 1/400 sec, f/6.3, ISO 5600 —
map & image data — nearby photos

Rick and Lily Hancock

at the Rokkaku-do Temple (六角堂), Kyoto Japan

I had the pleasure to have lunch today with Rick and Lily Hancock,
visiting from Seattle. Rick has been reading my blog for years, and often
comments, so we finally met “IRL” (In Real Life).

We spent all our time talking over ramen at Gogyo (五行)
so didn't have much time for an outing afterwards, but walked over to the
Rokkaku-do Temple for a few pictures.

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 24mm — 1/400 sec, f/6.3, ISO 4500 —
map & image data — nearby photos

Live Omikuji Tree

As I described on this post six years
ago, it's common at temples and shrines to pay a
small fee for a random “fortune paper”.
If you get a good one,
you take it home, but if your fortune is bad, you leave it tied it to
strings or sticks near where you got it. An
example from earlier in the year can be seen here.

At the place today, they were tied to an actual willow tree.

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 24mm — 1/400 sec, f/2.8, ISO 1600 —
map & image data — nearby photos

Engulfed








Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 24mm — 1/400 sec, f/2.8, ISO 500 —
map & image data — nearby photos

Common Scene

Out of town school kids and the taxi driver escorting them around









Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 24mm — 1/400 sec, f/2.8, ISO 3600 —
map & image data — nearby photos








Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 24mm — 1/400 sec, f/2.8, ISO 3200 —
map & image data — nearby photos

The temple dates back at least 800 years, presumably predating the Starbucks Coffee immediately adjacent to it.

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 24mm — 1/400 sec, f/2.8, ISO 1000 —
map & image data — nearby photos

Back Window of a Starbucks

overlooks the side of the temple grounds

I feel a bit sorry for these in-city temples that have become hemmed in
by modern progress, though I suppose whether an immediately-available
Starbucks is a curse or a blessing likely depends on just how much you like
slightly-overpriced consistently-made good-enough coffee.

(Rick and Lily are from Seattle, but have never been to a Starbucks, a pattern
that I don't think they broke today.)

It's Rick's comment
in April that really got me to dig into why Strava elevation-gain value
for a bicycle ride is unreliable, eventually leading to a massive amount of
work that ended up in “The Voodoo of Elevation Gain and Strava (and How I Get Around
It)”. But as it turns out, the desire for more accurate results caused
me to eventually abandon the initial project favor of an even larger one
that combines my ride data with road and elevation data from the Japanese
government. I've finally built up a large enough corpus of data on area
roads that I can now get very precise elevation-gain data for my rides. It's been a huge amount of work, and it's all Rick's fault.

Rick has promised* to come back in the spring for an extended
cycling vacation, so he'll finally be able to ride the Kyoto mountains he's
said he enjoys seeing so much in my blog, and enjoy the fruits of the huge
software project that his comment was my impetuous to build.

* He didn't actually promise.