Day Trip to Saku in Nagano

I had to head up to Nagano, Saku city for a meeting this past Tuesday, sure I could have taken the Shinkansen, but where is the fun in that?
The weather was just about perfect, so I took the VTR, boy what a great day, and a great ride!!

I decided NOT to drone up the expressway to Nagano, and instead wanted to take Route #299, but instead of starting at the usual place, I started in Higashi Ome, on Route #28, switched over to Route #53, and followed the up until it connected with Route #299, from there all the way to Route #141, and into Saku.

Route #28 is very short, maybe 3 Km long, but from there you get onto Route #53, which is a really great "B" Road!! Yeah, just love those kinds of roads on the VTR, as you leave it in 2nd and just surf the big torque wave! Almost like riding an automatic, but in a good way! I rode on Route #53 for maybe 10 or 15 minutes, and did not see a car or anyone, had the road mostly to myself!

Here is a really big map of my route that day
Click on the thumbnail for the large image

On #53, I stopped at this small gas station, I wanted to fill up, just to see what kind of mileage I was getting about 16km/liter.

The nice lady at the gas stand told me about the statues on the hill top in the background there............

.............you can drive right up to them, and then you can take the stairs to the top of the tallest one, and see the view.
Not this time around, but maybe on another trip. In this little valley, that #53 runs though, there are a ton of campsites, very nice.

Once I got onto #299, the first bit was fun, but then there is a bit that runs through a bunch of small towns,
 a little boring, but still beats the heck out of Tokyo!!

From there I headed into the mountains you see in the distance, well worth the wait!!

Once I got up into the mountains a bit, I stopped and took a couple of pics of where I'd been!!

This bit was just about perfect, the road was SO smooth and the thing just flowed up the side of that mountain!

Again, I got to say how great the VTR1000F is on this kind of road, it just flows up the hillside, so easy to ride at a nice fluid pace.
I'll bet that I did not touch the brakes sometimes for 10 or 15 corners, as I would just use the engine braking.

The VTR ran flawlessly, I sure do like that bike!

After the meeting and dinner it was getting late, so I droned back on the expressway.

Great day, great ride!