Saturday, September 27, 2008

27 September 2008

Davenport and Swanton


Bonny Doon Elementary
It was sunny with a slight chill when I started off. The club ride started at natural bridges and there was group of runners there also. Team in Training, I think. I got signed in, and eventually we started towards Davenport.

Heading north on Hwy 1 soon led to heavy fog. I could barely tell that I was at the descent just before Davenport at San Vicente Creek. There were a couple of busloads of tourists at Davenport. German, I think. A guy motorpacing a scooter went by headed north, and then came back headed south just as we left.

On Swanton, the fog started clearing, and it was clear at the summit. I took off my windbreaker. It was chilly descending back to Hwy 1. On Hwy 1 back to Davenport, it was foggy again, but the fog was spottier.

Heading up Bonny Doon, it got sunnier. I stopped at Bonny Doon Elementary, and it was warm and sunny. An old guy in a really old VW stopped to ask for directions. He had a map printout and was really close to his destination. Ice Cream Grade had been resurfaced, though there were still patches of gravel.

Empire Grade had been resurfaced since last weekend. The gravelly mix was covered with a smoother surface. There was still gravel on the edges of the road though. Other than the foggy start, it was a beautiful summerlike early fall day.

Saturday, September 20, 2008

20 September 2008

Quick solo ride

The previous weekend, I was visiting relatives and got sick from playing with disease-ridden kids. I was still feeling a bit sick, so I went for a short ride, up Hwy 9, Hwy 236, Jamison Creek, then Empire Grade back.

It was warm and sunny. There was lots of gravel on the roads, due to lots of roads being resurfaced. Bay St was pretty much finished after being worked on the last 2 weeks. There was lots of traffic on Hwy 9. The James Dean mural at the Brookdale Lodge had been pretty much restored, though the little man holding the puzzle pieces to the right hadn't been restored.

It was 2:33 when I started on Jamison. Even though I was coughing a bunch, I felt relatively strong on the climb. The 1.33 sign still had a bunch of junk on it: the US flag, the investigate 9/11 sticker, the remnant of skunk tail. There was spiderwebs attached to the right side. The clock just turned 2:58 when I got to the top, so the climb took under 25 minutes.

After easing up, my cough got worse. Parts of Empire Grade had also been resurfaced, and there was lots of loose gravel, so I had to take those parts more cautiously than usual. The resurfacing started at Pine Flat and ended just before the sharp curves leading to Smith Grade, then restarted after the climb out of Smith Grade and ended just before the curves after the 8-14% grade sign.

Saturday, September 06, 2008

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.