Hitting The Early Morning Jackpot

4 April 2025

After three days of incessant rain, we finally got a dry start to a morning, which enabled me to get out on the bike and end up being rewarded with the most extraordinary sights for getting out so early.

Wet roads are my enemy as I don’t have the grip strength to brake sharply, and using rim brakes on my bicycle means their performance in the wet declines significantly.

So I had an added degree of caution as I started riding, but about a third of the way through my customary morning ride, I began to suspect I may be onto something special when I saw how resplendent Mount Fuji looked with the cold and wet of the past week leaving it covered in snow so it resembled its classical appearance. (Ironically, I got no photos despite having my camera with me.)

Riding into a park, I was blessed by a bunch of puddles that made for some amazing reflective photos that took advantage of the now rising sun.

And from there, the next gift came from the sharp rise in temperatures compared with the previous few days, and it arrived in the form of lovely mists rising up over the waters of the rivers I rode alongside.

In the early morning light, the mists were gorgeous and I reached a point where they formed a cloud over the river as the sun rose to form a hazy backdrop and blooming cherry blossoms offered a wonderful frame for a picture I could not resist trying to take. The results were fabulous, but nothing near the beauty presented to my naked eye.

And then, it was back to reality. I got home to face the massive fears brought on by the Trump tariffs the U.S. president announced yesterday that are to be laid on every other country in the world in a move the Financial Times described as being historically and economically illiterate.