Kyoto, and Darwin's sayonara party...

 A familiar face at fixed events around Kansai, and he just recently built up a beautiful MAKINO NJS keirin frame with all Suntour NJS parts. Very nice. I need to get some photos of it next time....

 The loiterers at Darwin's Sayonara party.....The Kyoto bike community is a very strong one...a lot of really nice people to meet..

 And afterwards, we headed to a huge red gate (cannot remember the name...) for a suprise alley cat....which was more like a hill climb semi-sprint... I was not ready for it, especially with my 38cm metallico handle bar with no grips! But it was really fun, and a good workout.... The Kyoto messengers dominated, but in about 11th place, I managed to win some cool little valve caps which suited Sayaka's Panasonic perfectly....red for the front, blue for the back.

 After the race we all went for a downhill blast in the wet (plenty of knee-to-the-top tube skids all the way), and met at the TRACK HEADS base: BOX. These are the guys responsible for most of the gold sprint events around Japan, especially the west of Japan (osaka, kyoto, kobe, nara etc...)
They had a nice little well-stocked bar, some new fixed gear video from Japan playing on the screens, and even this super-mini Ganwell Pro NJS frame, complete with Hatta NJS BB and full size lugs and tubes....very cool!

 Ogura San, the founder of DARWIN....it was Sayonara for him, as he embarks on a mission to live in the USA for a while. Good luck, Ogura!

 Sayaka, Miura, and Ogura, 3 people you have probably met if you are from Kyoto, or have ever been there for a bike event....Sayaka used to live in Kyoto, and that is where she got into bikes, and doing events, writing for bicycle magazines and so on.... Now that we are married and doing Track Supermarket and Gira Gira together, I feel like I probably owe a lot to some of the characters of the Kyoto bike community, who helped her fall in love with the bike scene....

And one of my best friends over here, who works for the NJS association, and actually lived in Australia until he was about 7 years old. I got to meet his new little baby, which was pretty exciting. Working for the NJS/JKA meant he had to relocate to East Japan, so we do not meet much any more. But after the event, I got a chance to meet him in the AM.