6 September 2008

Moss Landing

It was warm and sunny in the morning. It would become a pretty hot day in the sun. I headed to Capitola to get signed into the club ride. The first part of the ride was a slow jaunt down to La Selva Beach to join more riders starting from there.

When we left La Selva, I decided to hammer away along San Andreas, and was joined by another guy. The smell of strawberries was pretty strong. On Bluff Rd, I rode through a cloud of bees. A bunch of them bounced off my face, but none of them stung me. There was a pack of motorcycles on Struve. We stopped for lunch at Phil's Snack Shack in Moss Landing. I got a coke and a half pastrami sandwich.

After lunch, we headed back to Dolan, then Russo and Elkhorn. On Elkhorn, the one other guy and I started hammering again. Instead of following the route back to Trafton and San Andreas, we decided to head to Freedom, taking Garin, Lewis, Vega, San Miguel Canyon, Murphy Crossing, Hwy 129 and Carleton. We took a break at the market at the corner of Hwy 152.

Then, we took Casserly, Green Valley, Pioneer, Varni, and Corralitos, then Freedom and Soquel back. A little after 41st St, I started feeling a bumping from my rear tire. It wasn't flat when I checked it. The bumping got stronger. I checked it again. The wheel wasn't out of true and wasn't rubbing the brake. It got stronger again. I checked again. There was a piece of something wedged in the tire, and I couldn't pull it out on my first try. So I decided to just ride it home and then pull off the tire to remove it. I got to High St and started climbing when the tire blew with a loud hissing. It was the thing lodged in the tire. Since I was only about a mile and half from home, I walked the rest of the way home.