Four of the Old Spokes set out July 29 for a multiday adventure ride to Monterey, California. Our ride began in San Ramon, California at 8am with a warm up leg over the hills to Castro Valley and a coffee stop. Our second leg took us through Hayward and skirted the outside parts of the hood. The navigator knows this area well and kept us on a safe path into Union City where we made our second stop at Ihop for breakfast. Our third leg took us across the San Francisco Bay on the Dumbarton Bridge and into East Palo Alto another notorious crime ridden area. We stayed on the main road through town without incident. Crossing the freeway we entered another social economic world of Palo Alto home to Stanford University. The contrast of the two cities are vast, and situated within a mile of each other. The disparity in wealth of these two cities as seen from the seat of a slow moving bicycle makes you think and wonder how this can be in such a great place of the Bay Area.
Palo Alto, California is where the adventure really began with a mechanical problem on a wheel hub with one of the bikes. We stopped at two different bike shops to assess the problem and ended up replacing the entire wheel to continue on the trip. This took two hours out of the day, but we had to press onto our first nights destination of Santa Cruz. What lies between Palo Alto and Highway One on the California coast is a mountain, although some would call it a hill. At 4pm we arrived at Alice's Restaurant at the top of the mountain near La Honda where we ate a very late lunch. The road out of La Honda is a nice decent down to sea level, but we were battered by a headwind on the latter part which stayed with us for the next 48 miles.
We turned south on Highway One towards Santa Cruz at 6pm with 38 miles to go and two hours of daylight left. The four of us had to work as a team drafting each other to keep any speed going in the wind. Our bodies were stressed, working hard and twenty miles out of Santa Cruz we needed a snack break to energize ourselves for the last big push with daylight fading. We made sure our lights were on flashing mode and by staying together for safety we looked like emergency vehicles moving down the road extremely visible in the low level light. As Highway One ends we enter the city limits to find our hotel on our left arriving at our days destination at 9pm, 103 miles and 7hrs. 50 min. in the saddle later.
Day two was a more relaxed day starting with breakfast in downtown Santa Cruz, then moving on into the strawberry fields and Moss Landing for lunch where we met up with our sag support and dropped our heavy bike trailers in the van. Moss Landing is a fun fishing village with a great seafood restaurant (Phils) just off Highway One between Santa Cruz and Monterey. We finished our day with a ride through some more farm country and onto the bike path which took us into Seaside where we found our not so luxurious accommodations, but the price was right and our evening dinner at the Fish Wife's was outstanding.
Day three was a slow paced ramble to breakfast in Pacific Grove and a ride through 17 mile drive on the Pacific Coast a neighborhood of multi million dollar homes with a short stop at Pebble Beach Golf Resort before ending our adventure in downtown Carmel by the Sea.
Our totals for the adventure ride was 167 miles, 14hrs in the saddle covering three days.
