I had all but forgotten how wretched full insomnia is. Recently my sleep has been consistently unsettled on the back-end, but never enough to call it insomnia. Then the night before last night I had a remarkable full night sleep; solid eight hours, no waking, no dreaming. Rather than being refreshing, I think I was a bit dull and dead the whole day. That's not unusual.

Then similarly out of the blue, last night was full insomnia. I played three full mix CDs, which is 4 hours, and though I started sliding into sleep during the third CD, I was never totally out. Some songs I don't remember at all, so I must have gone below the threshold of sleep, but never for long. Most of the time, even when I was on the fringe of sleep, I could hear the song playing, even if I wasn't conscious enough to identify the song until I came up enough.

After four hours, it was 7 a.m. and at that point I stopped turning music on and for the next three or four hours it was like the usual unsettled back-end sleep; constant waking up and fading out. That kind of unsettled sleep after three or four hours of regular sleep doesn't qualify as insomnia. On the back-end of insomnia qualifies it as full insomnia. If I managed to fall completely asleep at 7 a.m., then it would've been a night of front-end insomnia.

Even being disconcerted by the full insomnia, the weather was nice as forecast and I decided to go on a planned bike ride. Cumulatively insomnia has its effect, but just one night is nothing. And going into winter I want to take advantage of any nice days as there will be weeks on end of no riding soon enough.

Having been able to climb hills recently, I decided to make a foray up the Yangmingshan National Park range (which includes the highest peak in the Taipei area, Qixing (Seven Stars), although I didn't do that today). It's the first time going up there with GPS so part of the reason is to make sense of the mess of roads and bike routes up there. It's a well-settled mountain, hardly backroads.

I went up from the only southeast access road off Zhishan. That way is pretty steep with lots of switchbacks. The highest point I reached was decent at below 1,700ft., but doing more of the mountain range goes considerably higher. Getting close to 1,700ft. on some Taipei area climbs is success, but in Yangmingshan, it's just passing through.

Yangmingshan from Zhishan Rd. exploratory foray: