First Trip with a Camera.

I finally made it out on a ride with a camera. It took me so long because I never before really went on a ride purely for the sake of just riding. But this time I did, I had no distance goal, no planned sprints, no overall time target, just a plan to go out, enjoy myself and take some pictures of the bike with stuff. Honestly, I was kind of inspired by the whole Flat Stanley thing, not that I was about to flatten my bike and mail it to people though.
Just now thinking about how I'll be writing this I realize that I should have tracked the mileage per each photo, but oh well. Anyway, even with the master plan to not plan any real 'training' into this ride, I still went 62.57 miles (100.7 km) and a max speed of 41.3 mph (66.5 kph) - I couldn't resist doing at least one sprint. But, it did take me almost 5.5 hours to do, so at least I stayed relaxed with the overall speed.

Moving onto the pictures now, I always thought it would be neat to have a picture of the bike and Zanpa Lighthouse (link takes you to Google Maps pin pointing the location of this picture). Unfortunately, they were doing maintenance on the lighthouse that day and I really couldn't get much closer than this rock here, but still a nice picture I think.

It was so nice out at Cape Zanpa that I decided to tool around on the paved trails near-by. I snapped a few shots while riding, in the second one you can see the lighthouse poking just about the trees.

From there I continued to travel north, on my way I spotted a van parked off the side of the road that was busted up and covered in graffiti, you just don't really see that here in Okinawa. I couldn't remember exactly where this was, so using Google Earth combined with the street view, I located it here. If you know Google Maps, you can actually go into the street view there and see the van without graffiti and covered in vines. Oh and by the way, there are no camera tricks or photoshoping here, that really is the size of an average van in Okinawa.

I kept on north, I thought it would be nice to get a shot by 'the big curved rock thing that goes into the ocean'. Obviously I could't remember what it was called or where it was really, I just knew that it was sort of near by and that it was one of many of the tourist attractions on the many capes of the island.

I saw a sign for Cape Maeda and made the turn, maybe this is it? No, it's just the payed parking area that is a great place to dive. I wouldn't know, I play on two wheels, on the ground, out of the water. Moving from there I found another small entrance to tiny paved path poking out from the grass (very tall grass) on the side of the 'road'. It went by a bunch of look-outs and was real pretty, but it ended in a long flight of stairs going back down to the road, so I turned around and got this shot on my way back to the closest road.

I started to follow part of the same route we took for the Tour de Okinawa, I find myself doing that a lot lately. But this picture here was not inspired by anything or planned at all, there just happened to be these flowers at the one intersection I go stopped at. I did think all the bright colors were nice. Oh look, 25.05 miles (40.31 km).

Look! A McDonalds! Big America California Burger! I don't remember exactly where this was, and I didn't eat there either.

I kept on north and, success! As soon as I saw the sign for Cape Manzamo I remembered that was where the rock bit was and I hooked a left turn out it's road, and up a big hill.

Well apparently it was the place to be that day because this picture is at the sign 200 meters from the parking lot, and the line of cars continued for about another 100 meters in the other direction. So not only could I not get a good shot of the bike with the rock, I couldn't even get the bike out to the lookout. So this is as close to it as I got, maybe I'll try again another day.

At this point, I knew that I was not that far away from 104, a road that takes you from one side of the island to the other. This location on Google Maps is estimated because it's outside of their detailed imagery areas of the island.

By the time I got to the gate for LZ Wren the sun was setting and I knew that, even though I had a bit of a way to go to get back (over 20 miles/32 km), these would be the last shots of the day. The reflective parts of the bike would make night photography (with a flash) really bad.

So here are the final two, both taken from the same spot, I just took one, turned around and took the other (in fancy 16:9 widescreen). I do not know the exact location and I'm not even going to bother trying to find it either, just enjoy and know that by this point in my ride I was starving and had to stop at a convenience store and spend what little money I had on me to get some snacks.

Okay, I lied, I went back and found it here.