July 17: Roppongi Crossing, Odaiba

 When we planned the trip, I was expecting that the kids would insist on visiting the Ghibli museum. But to my surprise when it came time to book it in June they weren’t excited about it. It wasn’t easy to do so while we were in Europe, and our backup plan to get those booked by a friend didn’t work out, so we ended up with a spare day.

I asked Gemini what a photography oriented morning would look like, and it suggested that Omoide Yokocho Memory Lane followed by a trip to Roppongi Hills. We took the subway to Omoide Yokocho, and indeed, the place was worth photographing. We weren’t night people, but I could see that at night the place would be very crowded and it would be even harder to get a good picture.

Roppongi Hills was much more of a mixed bag photography wise. On the one hand, they were preparing for a Doraemon event, which meant there were Doraemon statues everywhere, giving the place a distinctive “only in Japan” look. On the other hand, the city view tower wasn’t opened until 10am. Disappointed, we walked back out towards Roppongi crossing, and there found that it wasn’t that photogenic either. We noticed that there was a Fujifilm Photo History Museum that was also open at 10am, and walked around the Midtown Garden which was open.

When the Fujifilm Museum was opened we went in. There were huge displays of various cameras, but surprisingly, many of their cheap consumer cameras like the Instax were out of stock. I was surprised but I guess selling cameras wasn’t the priority for the museum. We then walked over to the City View tower and bought tickets to go in. There were two other events going on at the same time. One was an anime art exhibit that was completely sold out, and the other was an escape room puzzle based in the same city view tower! While walking around the tower, we would see groups of people huddled around paper puzzles and trying to solve them. It looked very intriguing but we couldn’t participate because everything was in Japanese.

Lunch was Ramen at the Afuri Roppongi Crossing Gate. This was a chain restaurant that was very popular, but as with all Ramen places, they seated us quickly once we got our orders in, splitting the kids up into another table so they could fit us in in timely fashion. Japanese kids are expected to be much more independent than American kids, but fortunately, Bowen and Boen were happy to eat without their parents watching over them.

Xiaoqin thought it might be a good idea to visit teamLab Planets Tokyo DMM. We took the subway to a nearby station, but it started raining heavily, forcing us to stop by the Gas Science Museum, a free museum run by the gas company. It was surprisingly propaganda light, but also targeted to a much younger age group than Bowen and Boen. By the time we made it to the Tokyo DMM, there was a huge line out the door. We were offered a choice to skip the line by paying $600, or make a booking for 6pm that night. We demurred. I then suggested that we visit the Gundam statue. Boen and Bowen had no idea what it was, but they decided to go for it. Xiaoqin was tired of riding the subway and decided to walk.

The Unicorn Gundam turned out to be outside a huge shopping center. Even to folks who’d never seen the anime, it’s an impressive statue and you could see lots of people taking pictures. Many were carrying “Gundam Base” shopping bags. It turned out that inside that huge shopping center on the 7^th floor was a Gundam fan store. We made it there only to discover that the real hobby shop could only be visited if you have a reservation. We visited the merchandising section which was free to visit without reservations, but didn’t buy anything. After this Xiaoqin joined us and we walked over to the fake Statue of Liberty. This overlooked the Tokyo Aqua Symphony, which played frequently enough that we stopped and watch it! When the symphony was over, we realized we were now close to when the Gundam statue was going to animate, so we went back to see it. That was a complete disappointment. All that happened was the top of the statue moved a little bit. I was sorry we wasted the time and effort!

For dinner, Xiaoqin thought we should visit the Ginza Corridor Street. This street was completely lined with restaurants of all sorts. We ended up walking into the Wagyu Sukiyaki. They asked if we had reservations, and we said No. “We’re full…” said the store manager. Then another employee walked in. “Hold on… Wait outside. It’ll be 10 minutes while we set up.” Apparently with the restaurant fully staffed the manager was now willing to take on 4 more customers! This was a level of flexibility I did not expect from a Japanese store manager.

This was the kids’ first time having Sukiyaki, and for myself, it’d been so long since I last had it that I didn’t remember when the last time I had it was. None of us balked at the raw egg that we would dip our Sukiyaki meat in. The food was delicious, we were hungry, and all that food went into our stomach in less than 30 minutes. When we were done they sprinkled truffle mushroom bits onto our rice and we downed it all. What a great meal.

Outside, it had started to rain again as we walked back to the Ginza station. Fortunately, it had stopped raining by the time we got to our AirBnB stop, and the walk back to the AirBnB for our last night was dry. Back at the AirBnB, we proceeded to pack for our flight to Hokkaido. First, we removed all the packaging—camera boxes, etc just took up valuable space. Then, we reconfigured so that what we needed for the flight would go into a carry on bag, while everything else would go into our checked bag. Finally, we told Bowen to get rid of his worn out shoes. While all this was happening we got the laundry started. We wouldn’t have laundry service when we landed at New Chitose Airport.

Review: The Upstarts

 The Upstarts is a corporate origin story about both AirBnB and Uber. Obviously, Uber has gotten a lot of press, and so has AirBnB (and in fact, I met one of the founders way back when they were tiny), but this book is a b it dated (published 2017), so I was afraid it wouldn't be relevant. To my relief, the book provided lots of details behind the scenes that I didn't know before.

One thing I didn't know was how AirBnB got traction. It turned out that the engineering co-founder Nathan Blecharczyk was a growth hacker (he previously worked on spamming software), and successfully hacked the growth of AirBnB in 2 ways:

While Airbnb has always minimized the impact of these programs, each bore the unmistakable mark of Nathan Blecharczyk. In late 2009, a few months after it had graduated from YC, Airbnb appeared to create a mechanism that automatically sent an e-mail to anyone who posted a property for rent on Craigslist, even if that person had specified that he did not want to receive unsolicited messages. If the apartment was listed in, say, Santa Barbara, the e-mail would read: “Hey, I am e-mailing because you have one of the nicest listings on Craigslist in Santa Barbara and I want to recommend you feature it on one of the largest Santa Barbara housing sites on the Web, Airbnb. The site already has 3,000,000 page views a month.” All these e-mails were identical except for the city, and they typically emanated from a Gmail account bearing a female name. (pg 99)

When that drew attention and they were asked to desist, they played another trick:

 Instead of luring Craigslist users to Airbnb, the company did the opposite: it allowed users to take a streamlined version of their elegant listing on Airbnb and then cross-post it with a single click on Craigslist. “Reposting your listing from Airbnb to Craigslist increases your earnings by $500 a month on average,” the site informed prospective hosts. “By reposting your listing to Craigslist, you’ll get the benefit of more demand, while still being able to use Airbnb to manage and moderate your inquiries.” (pg 101)

What I was surprised by was how sympathetic the coverage of Travis Kalanick was. The book pointed out, for instance, that peer to peer driving wasn't pioneered by Uber, because Kalanick was convinced it was illegal and would be shut down. It was Lyft that did so, yet Lyft never got bad press because the founders never came across as belligerent:

Logan Green and John Zimmer, escorted by Susan Kennedy, also made their way up to the fifth floor. They were earnest and personable, explaining with their usual missionary zeal their goal of filling empty seats in cars. “They always came across as choir boys,” says Kennedy. The CPUC “had to trust somebody when writing new laws. You can’t write in a vacuum, you have to listen to industry.” She speculates that if Uber had been the original advocate for ridesharing, there might have been provisions like drug testing of new drivers, which would have slowed down sign-ups and impeded the growth of the industry. “I wonder if Uber realized what they did for them,” Kennedy says. (pg 203)

Nevertheless, the book does cover what caused Kalanick to get ejected as CEO of Uber, and certainly the acquisition of Otto and defense of Anthony Levandowski was glossed over (my guess was that all that came to pass only after the book was published and the revised edition just didn't get as much put into it).

Another thing that this book does that most other business books do not do is that it covers survivorship bias. Rather than just focus on the genius between those 2 companies, the book covered lots of other startups in the same space but that did not make it. For instance, Couchsurfing predated AirBnB, but was constrained by its non-profit business. Similarly, there were other startups in the taxi replacement services that also failed for various reasons. It also covered extensively Uber's attempts to outpace its Chinese rivals in China, and in fact, at the end when Kalanick gave up he was asked "What made you think you could succeed in China with the government stacked against you?" His reply was unsatisfying, in that he knew it wasn't going to work but he just wanted to try for his own personal satisfaction.

I guess I came to reading this book 9 years late, but it was still surprisingly worth the time.

 

July 16: Tsukiji Fish Market

 

When you get up early, one of the places you should visit is the Tsukiji Fish Market. Nothing else in Tokyo is open as early as 7am. We first had to get Boen his new subway card, of course, but we got to the market at 8am and it was a nice happening place. One motivation was that we had dinner reservations at Kaiya Wakou that evening, and wanted to find the location as the reputation was that it was difficult to find. But once we got to the market we were overwhelmed by the displays of food that we walked several circuits of the outer market, sampling various foods before finally sitting down at a sushi place for some good dining. When we finally found the restaurant’s location the local stall owners told me that the place was closed but we knew that. We just wanted to know how to get to it tonight. Our next plan was to visit the Snow Peak Alpen Outdoor store in Shinjuku. Since we had checked baggage on Peach Airlines to Sapporo, I wanted to buy some really cheap hiking sticks for use in Hokkaido and Tokyo was the best place to get them. Furthermore, Bowen had worn out the sole of his hiking shoes, so we might as well get him new shoes while we were in Tokyo.

On the way to the store on the subway, we had to make a transition at Ginza. Xiaoqin decided that’s worth a visit, so we went out and walked around but before long, both kids were complaining so we decided to split the party, with Xiaoqin exploring Ginza while I took the kids shopping. We’d already had lunch at the fish market, so we visited the Alpen Outdoor store, located the outdoor section. Bowen found Salomon shoes to his liking, and the price after tax was reasonable, so we bought the sticks and the shoes together so we could get the tax free discount, and then went back to the AirBnB.

After having shot with the camera for the morning, I realized that I wanted a fill flash for it. None of the fill flashes at home were compatible with the Sony A7C2, so I might as well buy one. Internet shopping showed a store in Nagano that had it at a good price, and I also wanted a lens cap retainer, so hopped onto the subway to Nagano. A short walk to the store got me the Godox iT32 kit with the X5S trigger and a lens cap with a string that you could tie to the body. The Godox flash was leaps and bounds over the flashes I had for my Canon cameras. Instead of being powered by AA batteries, this unit had its own lithium ion battery, which was like having lithium batteries all the time! That made flash cycling incredibly fast, and it came with a flash diffuser, something you had to buy for the Canon flashes separately! For the price it was an incredible unit. The lens cap with a string wasn’t entirely satisfactory, but I didn’t want to burn more time camera shopping.

I walked into the Nagano mall and I was impressed. This was a beautiful mall that had both indoor and outdoors hallways connected together. So you would walk from Tokyo heat (where much of the food was) into an indoor shopping center. I spied a GEO mobile store, and found both Claire Obscur and Ghost of Yotei for very good prices. They were used but when you’re buying used from a Japanese store the disc looks sparkling clean and I had complete confidence. I bought both so I could get over the tax free limit. The shop employee emphasized to me that once I bought them tax free nothing was returnable. That was fine with me! I also bought some snacks for Bowen and Boen.

Xiaoqin and I both returned to the AirBnB at the same time, and had about a half hour of resting before it was time to visit Kaiya Wakou. Kaiya Wakou was basically a one man shop. His whole schtick is that he will grill shell fish in front of you. Along the way, he would chat, sing, and talk to you. There were 3 other people in the shop when we arrived, and they had been pretty smart, ordering for 2 instead for 4. We got overloaded with shellfish and by mid-way through the meal, Boen was so full he couldn’t eat any more. I myself had had enough shellfish that I didn’t feel like eating shellfish for the rest of our time in Japan! Nevertheless, it was a unique experience!

Tokyo/Hokkaido 2026 Index Page

This past summer, we decided to do 2 trips instead of one, because it was Bowen’s last hurrah before going to high school, where we expected him to get very busy. While my original proposal was to do the Coast to Coast hike in England, both Boen and Xiaoqin weren’t enthusiastic. Boen and Bowen both wanted to visit the Pokemon Center in Tokyo because their classmates had gone there and told them all about it. I figured that now that I was no longer being regularly asked to carry either kid (they’d both become way too heavy) it was time for me to buy a new camera. Tokyo’s the best place to buy a Japanese camera, because there is no tourist tax and there are frequent discounts during the summer.

With that, I booked direct flights from San Francisco to Narita airport via ZipAir. This was
a discount airline, but it had a good reputation and excellent pricing for summer travel. Now, the big problem with Tokyo is that it’s effectively tropical weather in mid July, which would be when we would be going.I decided that the right thing to do was to visit Hokkaido after 4 days in Tokyo, simply because it wouldn’t be absurdly hot during that time. Working off Claude, Gemini, and my previous bike tour in 2009, I decided we would attempt a hiking-oriented trip.

The problem with Hokkaido in the summer is that it’s highly impacted—you’re advised to make reservations ahead of time. So what we had to do was to place our bets as to where to have extra time so we had a chance to out wait the weather, and where to just risk having crap weather and not being able to do much about it.

Certain hikes like the Shirotoko 5 Lakes hike had to be booked far in advance, and having secured those reservations we also made bookings for the Kammuywakka Hot Springs waterfall hike. Asahidake Hot Springs was even at that early stage booked so full that lodging was expensive, so we decided to book an AirBnB for 5 nights in Biei instead. I figured there was plenty to do in Biei, and that a commute to Asahidake Hot Springs was only 45 minutes long, so it was a shorter commute than our usual visit to Mt Tamalpais from the south bay.

I also arranged to visit Drumkan, it being one of the highlights of my trip back in 2009. The brothers running the B&B were now in their 70s, but when I wrote to them they still remember our visit, mostly because of Yana Ivey. Xiaoqin and I decided that for our last night in Japan we would splurge and stay at the so-called “Secret” onsen that was just a 45 minute drive from the airport.

This is the index page for the trip, with links to photo albums and day by day trip entries.

Photo Albums

• Tokyo Fish Market
• Nakano
• Kaiya Wakou
• Tokyo
• Blue Pond and Shirahige Falls
• Biei and Furano
• Chiyoda Farm
• Mt Asahidake Loop
• Kurodake Summit 
• Ginga/Ryusei Falls and Lake Shikaribetsu
• Kitamani Fox Farm and Utoro
• Shiretoko Five Lakes
• Mt Mokoto and Lake Akan
• Mt Mashu, Mt Io & Wakoto Penninsula
• Natai Terrace
• Noribetsu Jugokudani
• Otaki Falls
• Marukoma Onsen
• Narita san Temple

Videos

• Kaiya Wakou
• Biei
• Mt Asahidake Loop
• Kamuywakka Hot Springs
• Kitamani Fox Farm
• Sahoro Resort Bear Mountain
• Noribetsu Jugokudani

Daily Journal

• July 13-14: Prologue
• July 15: Shinjuku and Shibuya
• July 16: Tokyo Fish Market
• July 17: Roppongi Crossing
• July 18: Tokyo to Chitose
• July 19: Chitose to Biei
• July 20: Biei Hot Springs, Lavender Fields, and Furano Roads
• July 21: Mt Asahidake Loop
• July 22: Asahikawa and Shinei No Oka
• July 23: Chiyoda Farm
• July 24: Biei to Suonkyo Onsen, Mt Kurodake
• July 25: Lake Shikaribetsu
• July 26: Suonkyo Onsen to Utoro
• July 27: Shiretoko Five Lakes + Kamuiwakka Hot Springs
• July 28: Utoro to Kawayuonsen
• July 29: Mount Mashu, Mount Io, and Wakoto Peninsula
• July 30: Kawayuonsen to Shintoku
• July 31: Shintoku to Noribetsu
• Aug 1: Noribetsu to Marukoma Onsen
• Aug 2: Marukoma Onsen to San Francisco, California
• Conclusions

Review: All You Need Is Kill

 All You Need Is Kill is the source novel for the Tom Cruise movie, Edge of Tomorrow. The protagonist of the novel, Keiji, is a soldier in the Unified Defense Forces about to go into battle with invaders from space, the mimics. He fights in a first battle and then gets reset to the beginning of the day. From there on, he gets the opportunity to figure out how to get out of the time loop and how to go about surviving his battles.

The writing style is breezy, easy reading, and occasionally a little dumb. The plot rolls along and we get reveal after reveal, and then the ending kinda sucks, in a completely opposite approach from the way the movie's ending sucks. The movie has a happy ending that's typical of Hollywood. This novel has a bittersweet ending that's typical of Japanese TV shows, but both are similarly unearned. What's interesting is that the movie actually had an appropriate ending only to snatch it all away with a final reset, while the novel itself had a contrived reveal specifically designed to create its bittersweet ending.

The novel is short and at the very least if you try it and it's not to your liking you haven't wasted your time.

July 15th: Shinjuku and Shibuya

We had 2 goals today, which was to buy a new camera and going to the pokemon center. After breakfast, we went to the local subway and bought subway tickets. We got up so early that Yodabashi Camera wasn’t opened yet, so we went to Shinjuku Chuo park and explored the park. Even so, we still ended up waiting about 15 minutes in front of the camera shop before it opened.

When the camera shop opened, I tested both the Sony A7C2 with the Sigma 20-200mm lens, along with the Nikon Z52 with its 24-120mm lens. The Nikon was a few hundred dollars cheaper than the Sony, but when I shot the cameras with my own SD card and then compared them in lightroom on my laptop, I decided that the extra 4mm of wide angle was more valuable than the nearly imperceptible difference in image quality as well as the longer reach at the 200mm end. The Sony A7C2 with the 20-200 was also lighter by about 276g, which is more than half a pound difference. The difference wasn’t magic—the Nikon 24-105 was an F4 constant aperture lens while the Sigma degraded quickly to F6.3, which is more than a stop and a half. However, modern cameras perform well even with the ISO set to 12000 (which would have been inconceivable on any of my now ancient cameras) so that was a wash. What really made an even bigger difference was that the A7C2 had a 33 megapixel resolution, which meant that I could crop out 50% of the photo (effectively extending the reach of the 200mm lens to 400mm) and still get an 16 mega pixel image! I got a quote from the salesman, and then we went to the video game section of Yodabashi camera to shop for video games while waiting for Map camera to open.

Yodabashi’s video game store was disappointing. Boen found Pokemon Pokopia at a good price, while I got a copy of Soras for the PS5 at a discount from USA prices, which I shouldn’t have because I later found used copies at even better prices. When Map camera opened we went in and indeed got a much cheaper quote from them, but then they told me they didn’t have international versions of the Sony A7C2! Disappointed, we went to Fuunji Shinjuku for their dipping ramen. There was a line out the door, but we finally figured out that what we had to do was to go into the store anyway, and use the machine to order food. When the food was ordered we’d get tickets to hand over to the servers. What this meant was that as soon as one party left, the next party was immediately seated and the food was already ready and served! That meant that while the line was long and the restaurant tiny, turnover was rapid and we were seated and eating within 30 minutes!

After lunch, I queried ChatGPT, detailing my disappointment with the prices at Yodabashi Camera. ChatGPT replied that BIC camera had a deal where the A7C2 (international version) bundled with the 28-60mm kit lens was on sale for less than Yodabashi’s body only price. In addition, there was a 5% coupon available online which would stack with the body and the Sigma 20-200mm so that the total package price made it not worth it to stop by Map camera for the lens and then walking over to BIC. It was already very warm when we got out of the restaurant, making Boen insist on buying an electric fan from Yodabashi camera on our way to BIC.

At BIC camera, the salesman walked me through all the steps to get the coupon, and helped me pick out a circular polarizer and a screen protector for the camera. The circular polarizer is the one last filter that you end up buying, useful for removing reflectance from vegetation as well as making rainbows look better. 81B warming filters are no longer required since you can just adjust the white balance in Lightroom. As a matter of curiosity, I asked how much the international version of the Nikon Z52 would be and he told me that Nikon Z52s in Japan never came with an English menu. What you would have to do was to buy the camera, and go to the Nikon service center and pay a fee to get the English firmware installed! That confirmed for me that my decision was the right one. I bought the camera, got out my passport and got an exemption from the sales tax right on the spot.

While we were there, Xiaoqin found some cosmetics at a good price, and we also bought floss for the kids—they’d forgotten to pack their floss. After that it was time to visit the Pokemon Center Shibuya. Boen, however, announced that he had lost his subway card! This was a big headache, and necessitated us visiting no more than 3 different places in the subway station before we found someone who could talk to the station manager to cancel the lost card and do all the paperwork so that we could buy a new one tomorrow! Boen’s card was special since it was a half priced card so unlike an adult card, same day replacement was not possible.

With that ordeal out of the way we visited the Pokemon Center. The place was a zoo! It was completely crowded. It’s clear that Pokemon was a global phenomenon and we could see lots of tourists browsing all sections of the store, and the checkout line was super long as well. Boen’s goal was to buy lots of stuffed animals and it took all our parental authority to not have him fill all of our carry on luggage with stuffed animals. We checked out and everyone was exhausted, so it was time to go back to our AirBnB.

Bowen wanted Sushi and we were done with subways. We ended up at Sushi Kaoru, which when it opened was not crowded. After dinner, we stopped by the supermarket to buy real supplies for breakfast, including dessert and ice cream and went back to the AirBnB to relax and get some sleep. The AirBnB was equipped with a washer but not a dryer, so what we had to do was to do laundry after showering, and then turn the shower room into a drying room since it had a vent and you could actually set it up to reduce humidity and then close the door.

July 13-14: San Francisco to Tokyo

Our flight from San Francisco was smooth, and since we had no baggage, we could walk through the temperature sensors, scan our passports through customs, and then get our Japanese landing visa. Surprisingly enough, despite them asking us how long we planned to be in Japan, they stamped our visa for the maximum days we were allowed to be in the country.

Getting to the Keisei Skyliner counter, we bought one way tickets to the Nippori station. The Keisei Skyliner looks like an old train and is just as rocky and rickety as an old train, but moves very fast, stopping only at a few stops and not even slowing down at all when passing through stations it is not scheduled to stop at.  While much of it was underground, there was an open air section where we looked out through (closed) windows into the night scene.

Arriving at Nippori, we got to the taxi stand and showed a taxi driver the address of our AirBnB. The ride wasn’t long, but the taxi driver actually had to circle around because he actually didn’t know where it was! We got into the AirBnB, turned on all the AC as the weather was decidedly tropical, and then walked out to the local convenience store (Family Mart) to buy some snacks for dinner and breakfast. Unlike California, Japan’s supermarkets do not open until a relatively late our (9-10am!), so they’re not a good source for breakfast food!

We expected an easy jet-lag experience because we were traveling West, but it was already quite late by the time we’d all taken showers so I took a melatonin extended release pill before going to bed.

2026 Tour of the Alps Conclusions and Thoughts

 This was a very warm year, and just like last year, we didn’t lose any traveling days to rain. Our plan to use the train to skip the hot flat sections of Italy worked out as I expected, and we got very lucky in that every road closure (other than the Col de Tende one --- and that was always a stretch goal anyway)was navigable with minimal losses to our schedule. What surprised me was how arriving in the French alps a little early was quite problematic. For instance, Col de la Madeline was pretty much devoid of any place to buy lunch except at the summit. Similarly, Isola 2000 had few places to stay. This is because European school schedules are quite late compared to California—they  don’t let kids out of school until August, when everyone in Europe appears to go on vacation at the same time. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. On the one hand, finding lodging seems to be quite hard—though in some cases I feel like we should have had faith—arriving in St Etienne de Tinee, for instance, we should have just looked for lodging there instead of pre-booking, as there were better places that would have been available if we had arrived early enough in the day.

Despite all that, we had a great time, and whenever I’m visiting some place that’s not the alps I still find myself asking why I’m not in the alps. I’m sad to see the effects of global warming on my favorite places in the world, but I’m afraid for now humans are saying: “you first”, when it comes to preserving the climate the species evolved in.

I’m completely sold on EVs as a result of our experience with the Volvo EX30 this trip. While charging was a pain on one occasion, most of the time it worked really well. Every time I descended a mountain on the EV I always felt happy that I was getting energy back rather than dissipating it all into the brakes. At home, charging wouldn’t be a pain since you could charge at home, and the convenience of never having to go to a gas station plus the feel good aspect of not contributing to climate change is a big plus.

July 7th: Epilogue

 We got up early, ate the breakfast we bought the day before, and then checked out of the hotel and prepared for the shuttle ride. Arriving at the airport, I found a cart and then we proceeded to roll the carts up to the departure floor in order to get checked in. The Aer Lingus checkin counter was a disaster. There was a line, but none of the counters were staffed. Eventually they started taking finally taking Dublin flight checkins at 7:30am, despite the policy being to take checkins at 7:10am.

After getting our bike boxes weighed and tagged, we still had to take them to the oversized baggage counter for their bigger X-ray machines to run over them. The good news was that this was the last time we needed to deal with the boxes until we got to San Francisco. We cleared passport control, which was no big deal this early in the morning, and then customs, giving us plenty of time to do more chocolate shopping before boarding the flight.

The flight was late, arriving in Dublin at 12:15pm, meaning that we had to rush through US passport control and customs and try to get onto the Dublin to San Francisco flight within 15 minutes. We walked fast and made it, only to realize at the gate that the flight to San Francisco was also late by about 30 minutes! There was no communications at all from the flight crew to us about any of this. Well, this gave us time to buy lunch. I wondered whether our bike boxes would make it, since this was a very tight connection.

Arriving jet-lagged and bleary back in SFO, the good news for us was that we had no customers or passport control to clear—having already done all that in Dublin. In fact, the Aer Lingus flight directly took you to the domestic terminal.

The bad news was that Xiaoqin’s bike was missing at the luggage claim oversized counter. All the other bikes had arrived, including Mark’s the tandem, and a couple of others that belonged to other cyclists. We filed a claim and then got picked up by Steve Wang.

Xiaoqin and I spent a couple of days worrying about her Ritchey Road logic, but 2 days later they finally delivered the final bike box to us. Aer Lingus continues to this day to deny our claims for compensation for the meals due to our delay imposed by them. We're still awaiting the results of an appeal to the Irish authorities, which can take as long as 6 months.

Review: A Life on Our Planet

 A Life on Our Planet is Sir David Attenborough's memoir and plea to humanity to not bollox up the planet any more for human life than it already has. The early part of the book is his memoir, detailing how he ended up being in front of the camera rather than just a producer. Unlike many TV people, Attenborough actually does have a background in science and has experience explaining the science to a lay audience.

I love the part where he talks of how the baseline has shifted in how we perceive the option:

Records and reports even from just beyond living memory, back in the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth, describe an ocean that we wouldn’t recognise. Old photographs show people thigh-deep in salmon. Reports from New England tell of fish shoals so vast and so close to shore, that locals would wade in to take them with their table forks. In Scotland, fishermen would haul in a line of 400 hooks and find flatfish on almost all of them.16 Our not so distant ancestors fished with nothing more complex than hooks and nets of cotton. We now struggle to catch something edible, with technology that would take their breath away...A shifting baseline has distorted our perception of all life on Earth. We have forgotten that once there were temperate forests that would take days to traverse, herds of bison that would take four hours to pass, and flocks of birds so vast and dense that they darkened the skies. Those things were normal only a few lifetimes ago. Not any more. We have become accustomed to an impoverished planet. (page 84, 100)

When you read passages like this, you do not wonder why Tolkein's words, for instance, are full of nostalgia and sadness. Living during the transition from the Holocene to the Anthropocene is a sad experience, with the Earth denuded and burnt, species driven to extinction, and of course, the planet overheating.

The second part of the book describes what we can do, and there's a lot of hope. For instance, I always thought that it was pointless to have "no fishing" zones since there are no boundaries in the sea and ocean. It turns out there are studies showing that's not true:

The Marine Protected Area of Cabo Pulmo lies at the tip of Baja California in Mexico. In the 1990s, this area of sea was extensively overfished, and the fishing community, desperate for a solution, agreed to suggestions from marine scientists to set aside over 7,000 hectares of their coast as a no-fish zone. The local people describe the years immediately after the MPA was opened in 1995 as the hardest years they had ever faced. The fishing families caught very little in the neighbouring waters and had to survive on food vouchers offered by the Mexican government. Fishermen could see growing shoals in the MPA, and were often tempted to break the ban. It was only the faith the community had in the marine scientists that kept their resolve. It was at about the ten-year point that sharks came back to Cabo Pulmo. The older fishermen remembered them from their childhood, and knew they were a sign of recovery. After only 15 years, the amount of marine life in the no-fish zone had increased by more than 400 per cent to a level similar to reefs that had never been fished at all, and the fish shoals began to spread into the neighbouring waters. The fishermen caught more fish than they had done in decades, and what is more, the community had a tourist attraction on their doorstep. The men and women of Cabo Pulmo found new sources of income–dive shops, guesthouses and restaurants (page 148)

It turns out that just a bit of restraint on the part of one coastal area is sufficient to allow marine life to recover to the point where the fishermen and their descendants are economically better off than back when they fished without restraint. Seems like a no-brainer, except of course we all know people who are into "free-dumb". One of the points of the book is that just talking about climate change is insufficient--to be maximally successful we have to preserve the biodiversity of the planet and prevent the extinctions that will continue unbated if things go on like they have been.

 I have one friend (and I'm sure most of you reading this have friends like this) who love to say things like: "The planet has been warmer before, and it has recovered." Attenborough is very careful to note that when the Earth had been warmer int he past, humans did not exist, and would have a very uncomfortable time living on that warm a planet:

We often talk of saving the planet, but the truth is that we must do these things to save ourselves. With or without us, the wild will return. Evidence of this is no more dramatic than that to be seen in the ruins of Pripyat, the model city that had to be abandoned when the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded. When you step outside the dark and empty corridors of one of its deserted apartment blocks, you are greeted by a most surprising sight. In the 34 years since the evacuation, a forest has taken over the deserted city. Shrubs have broken up the concrete and ivy pulled apart the bricks. Roofs sag under the weight of accumulating vegetation, and saplings of poplar and aspen have burst through the pavements. The gardens, the parks and the avenues are now shaded by the canopies of oaks, pines and maples, 20 feet above the ground. Beneath, there is a strange under-storey of unkempt ornamental roses and fruit trees. The football field, which 34 years ago served as a landing pad for military helicopters sent to evacuate the city’s inhabitants, is now covered by a thicket of young trees. The wild has reclaimed its territory...The living world has survived mass extinctions several times before. But we humans cannot assume that we will do the same. We have come as far as we have because we are the cleverest creatures to have ever lived on Earth. But if we are to continue to exist, we will require more than intelligence. We will require wisdom. (pg 219, 220)

The book provides a timeline projecting the horrors in our future if we stay on "business as usual", letting capitalism and greed run rampant. The book was written in 2020, but some of the forecasts have already come to pass, though there is some relief on at least one front, which is many countries now have reduced fertility which should help unload the Earth of some of its burdens.

I sincerely hope this book is successful in its goals. But judging from the 2024 election, a large number of people just don't care or actively wish to do more harm to the planet and its life support system. I guess humanity really will try everything else before turning to doing the right thing.

July 6th: Thonon-les-Bains to Hotel Movenpick Geneva Airport

 Xiaoqin and I got up early enough that breakfast wasn’t ready yet, so we took a walk in the morning back to the viewpoint we saw last night. After breakfast, we packed up, I unplugged the fully charged car and drove it back to the hotel’s loading zone, and we loaded up the car with all luggage before Boen and I got the tandem out along with Mark. The owner of the hotel came out and said: “Can I get a picture of you and your son on the bike? It’s such an inspiration. I didn’t even think it was possible.”

With that, we rode the bike down to the lake front and followed the signs around the lake, since from
Evian on, there was actually an official bike route! The relief from traffic didn’t last long, however, since within 5km we found ourselves back onto the main road again. Fortunately, we weren’t on the main road for more than a kilometer before we got to follow the signs towards Yvoire. The road around Lake Geneva wasn’t flat, but did undulate a bit. While occasionally we saw a bike path next to us, most of the time the traffic was light enough to just stay on the pavement. In Yvoire, we deviated from the designated route long enough to ride to the bottom of the village where we could touch the lake proper before turning around riding back up. Just at the entrance of the old town we ran into Bowen and Xiaoqin, who had just parked and walked over. We took some pictures and then rode on.

From Yvoire, we rode along at a distance from the lake. The towns were still cute, but none were as pretty as Yvoire, and lake views were no longer common, being blocked by either houses and other buildings or rows of trees. Finally, the road dipped all of a sudden and I immediately felt a change in the road surface. “We must be in Switzerland now!” I told Boen. And indeed, we had just ridden over the border in Herrance. The road in France up to that point wasn’t rough, but the minute you get into Switzerland you feel it because the road feels freshly paved, and suddenly everything looks neater. The bus stops look cleaner, the streets look freshly swept, and even the flowerpots outside houses look freshly tended.

Soon, the road descended all the way to the lake shore again, and we could spy off in the distance, the grand fountain at the outlet of the lake where the Rhone continued. We’d last seen it a month ago, and it felt like we had been gone a long time. From the bridge over the Rhone, we started the climb back towards the airport, following bike paths that were now well signed. We dodged street cars and arrived at the hotel at 11:00am.

I went to the reception and showed them our left luggage tickets and they helped me get out the bike boxes. I started packing the tandem, taking things apart, and Xiaoqin arrived after an hour when I was done with as much as I could without more tools that were in the car. I checked into the hotel, getting keys and so forth (they didn’t try to charge me an early checkin fee), and after taking most of the luggage out of the car, kept packing the bikes until they were all done.

It was about 1:00pm when Mark dropped by to pick up his luggage. I then drove the car to the airport rental return, which was very little hassle, and then walked back to the hotel. The hotel gave us free city passes, which meant all the tram rides were free! We walked to the tram station with Boen’s carry on luggage and proceeded to go to downtown. To my surprise, downtown Geneva had all sorts of Tour de France pennants and posters as well, even though as far as I knew it wasn’t on this year’s route! I would investigate later and then was told that those pennants were for the Tour de France Femmes, the less predictable women’s race.

We bought quick lunches at Coop and visited the Sprungli shop in downtown Geneva. To our surprise, the Sprungli shop wasn’t a café—it only sold chocolate and you were expected to eat it at home or outside. “We only have a café at the Zurich airport and downtown Zurich,” explained the cashier. We found a shaded place to eat and drink. While we bought some Sprungli chocolate, it was all for eating while we were in Switzerland. The kids wanted to visit the Lindt store, so we walked over to the Lindt store. We explored what they have but didn’t want to commit to buying until we were ready to leave downtown. It was so warm that there was a chance the chocolate would melt in the luggage!

Walking out of the Lindt chocolate place who did we run into but Mark! He was up for an early dinner, so we went to an Asian restaurant that advertised duck. It wasn’t great but had one redeeming feature that made up for the relatively poor food: it had AC! Mark had skipped lunch and was hungry.

After dinner, we went back to the Lindt store, bought chocolate, and then took it back to the hotel. We’d already reserved places on the 6:40am shuttle to the airport so we wouldn’t be in any danger of missing the flight. We were all packed and ready for our ordeal back to the USA with Aer Lingus.

Review: Game Wizards

 Game Wizards is the history of TSR from the conception of the classic RPG as a collaboration between Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, to the founding of the company until the ouster of Gary Gygax from the company it founded. It includes several pictures and important documents from that era, including internal memos, newsletter quotations, and of course, beautiful illustrations from Dave Sutherland.

As a kid growing up, I remember hearing about the disputes between Gygax and Arneson about the origins of the game. What I didn't know was that there was a massive lawsuit between Arneson and TSR. This book does a lot to explain what was going on behind the scenes.  Dave Arneson does not come off well. Apparently, he did convert chainmail into an RPG, but the guy was uninterested in writing down rules, editing, or publishing. As a result, other people did most of the work while he sat back and collected royalties.

Gygax, of course, had his different foibles. He easily antagonized fans and other industry luminaries, was egotistical, and in the end really lost interest in managing his company, preferring to live the high life in Hollywood trying to turn D&D into a media franchise rather than dealing with the nitty gritty of running a business. As a result, TSR started losing money despite growing revenues, and ended up with lots of debt. Even then, he could have salvaged his ownership stake in TSR and ignored his right to purchase shares from his business partners until it was too late. Lorraine Williams swept in and bought up the shares and then ousted him from the company he founded.

If you ever think that management doesn't matter in a running business, this story of TSR is your antidote. Good management matters a lot. One of the points the book makes repeatedly is that when Gygax and Arneson drew up their partnership, nobody thought D&D was worth more than about $300. 2 broke guys doing something for the love of hobby weren't going to engage a lawyer to draw up the contract properly, and to be honest, TSR did far more than was legally necessary to compensate Arneson. Most people at this point know that you cannot copyright game mechanics and ideas, just actual writing, so a meaner version of TSR would have been justified in deleting Arneson's name from the basic set, which was written by Eric Holmes. But then again, remember that neither Gygax nor Arneson ever had a corporate job. Gygax never even had so much as a high school diploma.

I would love a follow up on how TSR was handled post Gygax, and the rescue of TSR by Wizards of the Coast. I don't know why Lorraine Williams was so hated by the D&D community, and obviously I'd love the inside scoop on what happened when Wizards swooped in. This book is very much worth reading.

July 5th: Col des Mosses to Thonon-les-Bains

 Breakfast at the hotel was surprisingly good despite my low expectations. The food was plentiful and of reasonable quality. We did not see any other cyclists, probably because we got to breakfast late. By the time we checked out it was already 8:45, and we immediately descended down to the intersection where the route said to turn off the road to Aigle. This quickly led to another road with a construction sign, and then a “no entry” barrier which we proceeded to ignore on the basis that it was a weekend day and the construction crew was likely to be off. I have great faith in the European work ethic.

Indeed, at one point we had to walk around some construction, but we soon found other cyclists going our way as well as the other way, indicating that the construction was fairly short and that we’d get to descend more soon enough. Indeed, the descent to Ormont-Dessus soon took over and we had an easy descent. From the center of town, Mark would start his climb to Col du Pillon while we rode up the Col de la Croix pass. There was a cable car in town, but  it wasn’t running yet this early in the morning.

Col de la Croix is a minor pass, mostly wooded and while there was traffic on a Sunday we were still early enough that it didn’t bother us at all. The road was a steady 7.4% grade, and being relatively fresh we were both somewhat surprised when we reached the summit. “That’s all?” asked Boen. “Yup!” We ate the last of our cycling food, took pass photos, and hiked a trail to see a view of Mont Blanc that was underwhelming.

A bus took off from the summit and went down the hill. We gave it a few minutes before we noticed that the traffic was getting denser, so decided to descend. It didn’t take long before we caught up with the bus. The danger of doing that on a tandem is that the bus forces you to ride the brakes instead of letting the tandem roll, but fortunately at that point we were in Villars-Sur-Ollon and the bus had to stop. We overtook the bus and then let the tandem rip. From Villars to Ollon is a series of switch backs and corners. The traffic was dense but since we were moving at least as fast as car traffic were weren’t disturbed.

In Ollon, the route took us towards Aigle, where we found a café that was open and ate lunch. After lunch, we rode across the Rhone and entered the bike path. The bike path would have groups of cyclists in pacelines, riding in the opposite direction from us, occasionally with motorcycle escorts! Even more interestingly, at one point on the bike path we saw that the bike path went past the UCI World Cycling center! The event turned out to be the Portes du Soleil Cyclosportive.

Once the bike path hit the coast of Lake Geneva, the bike path disappeared and we ended up on the main road. The road was still pretty, and there was a bike lane all the way until the French border at Saint-Gingolph, where we stopped for a photo only to find that Mark had caught up to us and was right behind us! We all took pictures together, and descended down to the beach to celebrate before climbing back up to the main road and then found the dedicated bike path leading out of the city.

The bike path took us away from the main road and went up and down granting us long distance views of the lake. Lake Geneva is big enough that you couldn’t see the other side when you’re standing on the coast, so it felt almost like being next to an Ocean. The bike path dumped us back onto the main road at Locum, where we had to share the road with relentless traffic. I could see why the tourism agencies didn’t want inexperienced riding this road, but if you’ve been cycling in California you deal with traffic like this all the time. Furthermore, we knew that this traffic had a limit. We had a left turn coming up in 3km.

When  the bike computer beeped and signaled the turn, however, I saw that the road had a sign that said: “No left turn.” Well, I didn’t care. We signaled to traffic, waited for a break, and zipped across onto Route du Champ Poirier, which immediately started climbing. The day was warm and we were in the sun, but the traffic relief was immediate. There were no cars in either direction and we could use the width of the road to zig zag up the hill.

Rather than a coaset highway, this road took us through little towns that were just offset from the coast and on a ridgeline, before dropping us off at Evian-les-Bains, where of course we had to stop at the Source Cachat, the spring fed fountain that’s the bottled source of Evian water! “This tastes just like ordinary water,” said Boen, after he’d had a taste. The water was cool, it tasted good, but yeah, it’s amazing the power of marketing to get people to buy bottled water that’s just ordinary. Xiaoqin and Bowen parked nearby and showed up in time to see a guy carry a cart full of glass bottles and just fill every bottle up while folks lined up behind him.

When it came time to leave we rode down to the lake shore highway, and I noticed a big arch with a “Departee” sign on it! Without knowing it, we had ridden through what would be the start line of the Stage 16 time trial of the 2026 Tour de France! We then started noticing Tour de France pennants and sign posts all over the town. If we had known about this we might have downloaded the route and ridden the 26.1km time trial course from Evian to Thonon, but it was already warm and we had already done one pass (or in the case of Mark, two passes!) for the day, so we opted instead to ride the official bike path to Thonon-les-Bains, which took us past the Evian factory before heading back to the coast and then climbing to the center of town where we were staying at the Hotel Thonon Le Comte Rouge.

The hotel looked like a castle on booking.com, but in reality is was just a small hotel run by an Indian family. They happily parked us inside the lobby, gave us the room keys, and when we asked where to park they told us that the Place des Arts parking lot had overnight parking for 5 Euros a day, and had charging stations to boot. After confirming that the rooms had AC that could be turned on, I walked down to the parking lot and to my surprise, the lot manager confirmed that yes, it was only 5 Euros per night, and the charging stations could be occupied even when the car had finished charging, so there was no need to move the car in the middle of the night!

When Bowen and Xiaoqin arrived, we moved the luggage up to the apartments and I drove the car down (there were 6 charging spots, only one of which was taken), and parked the car and plugged it in. Other than the free charging in Bourg St Maurice, this was the cheapest charging for the entire trip, and we needed it too, because the rental contract stipulated that we were to return the car with at least 75% charge.

After we were all showered, we went out to dinner—once at Pizza Fresca, where we didn’t actually order Pizza, and once at Ni Hao Sushi, where Boen insisted on eating despite us telling him that with a name like that it was going to be run by Chinese, not Japanese. We didn’t need to do laundry that day, so we could buy ice cream and walk down to Funiculair Amont, which had beautiful views of Lake Geneva from high up. Thonon, being the finish line of the same time trial that was going to start in Evian, was as full of Tour de France decorations pennants and so on

To our surprise, the Funicular was free, so we walked down the path to the lake shore, which was a much happening place than downtown itself. It got a lake breeze which was cooler, and all the restaurants here were much busier than the ones near downtown. Of course, it also looked like it would take much longer to get service or even a single ice cream as well.

After exploring the coast line, we took the Funicular back up and walked back to the hotel. The next day was an easy ride back to our Geneva airport hotel—only 20 miles via the direct route, though Xiaoqin and I discussed meeting up in Yvoire to see one of the prettier towns on Lake Geneva. Mark didn’t have 3 bikes to pack and a rental car to return, so he was going to a ride up in the hills above Geneva before riding back to his hotel.