Today I finally made the 47-mile ride to the Pacific Ocean and back. This ride was unofficially my first mini-goal on the way to a much (!) larger goal of taking a bike trip to Portland sometime in the next year and a half.
I’ve been getting sort of addicted to cycling since I moved out here and bought a decent bike two months ago, and I’ve slowly been working on building up my stamina for these longer rides… though this one kind of spanked me (you might say “nearly killed me”.) My longest ride before this one was a 29-mile segment of this route that I did last Sunday, but today’s ride was pushing twice that distance. The saving grace was that the additional miles I added were much flatter than the hills (actually part of the Santa Cruz Mountains) separating Menlo Park from the ocean.
Anyways, here’s the route I took:
The way out was awesome - it was cool and gray, doing the bright overcast thing that the Bay Area likes to do. I climbed up Old La Honda Road, which the Stanford Cycling page calls “a beautiful classic benchmark climb of the region.” It is beautiful indeed, winding up through deep, dark, cool redwood forest, past big estates and hippie-ish homes with their own little water towers. There were lots and lots of folks riding this hill today, and I actually managed to keep up with a few of them for once!
One of the most bizarre, unexpected, and awesome things about this route is that it took me damn near Neil Young’s Broken Arrow ranch, which sits along Bear Gulch Road somewhere north of Highway 84 near the wacky little town of La Honda (one-time home of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.) I had no idea that Neil Young’s ranch was within a bike ride of me. Maybe next time I’m out there I’ll ride up to the gate and see if he’s out shooting at stuff or tending cattle or riding around on a train or something!
So then I got to San Gregorio State Beach and it ruled. I guess there’s something especially seductive about the idea of the Pacific to me, having grown up in Pennsylvania and nowhere near a body of water of any kind (unless you count Canoe Creek or Lake Erie I guess.) Maybe that explains why the idea of transporting myself to the Pacific coast with just the power of my own two (severely aching as I write this) legs is such a big deal to me. Who knows? It was a good goal, if nothing else.
I guess once I’ve recovered from today I’ll start thinking about my next goal. I think riding to San Francisco sounds like a pretty good plan!
PS should you want to see more pictures of this possibly not-so-enthralling-to-anyone-else journey they are here.
October 15th, 2006 at 11:59 am
Awesome. Hope you’ve got a nice padded bikeseat, or at least some padded testicles?
October 16th, 2006 at 12:41 pm
Gorgeous! I am so impressed with your effort. And the Bianchi is a damned nice bike. That doesn’t make the hills seem any easier, though.