Posts

As requested, GPS track from the recent Livermore / Del Valle adventure ride.

Taking a “shortcut” back down on an unlabeled rutted path (4x speed). A bit gnarly, especially on our smooth-tired touring bikes… but no one wiped out.

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For a while I’ve wanted to organize a vow-of-silence sunset ride (riding together for a few hours with no talking, no cell phones / cameras / other electronics, on a secret route where you can’t think ahead but just follow, look, and listen). After a scouting ride last weekend and a lot of dead ends, I had a route planned out criss-crossing the presidio, much of it on back trails, dirt paths, and little roads labeled “not a through street” you’d never have any reason to ride down. ...

[ wrote this up a few months ago and never posted it ] Earlier this summer, in Germany for work, I took a day to rent a bike and go on a roughly 40-mile ride through Bavaria along the Main river. It was brutally hot in the middle of the day (my phone claimed 100), and I read later there was an extreme weather alert warning people not to exert themselves outside… fortunately, relief in the form of ies and aperol spritzes were at hand. ...

My third or fourth time doing a variant on a 10-15 mile Dogpatch / Bayview shoreline ride, including old industrial buildings, murals, urban goats, the former site of Pound SF, Tire Beach (where some sort of sci-fi-esque photo shoot was going on?), the Heron’s Head park spit out into the Bay, India Basin, Yosemite Slough, a surprise glittering UFO behind a roll-up garage door, and some more and less official dirt paths between all of these. With the excellent All Good Pizza as a post-ride stop. ...

Earlier this year, biking around Copenhagen, I took a break at Mikkeller & Friends in Nørrebro. Not content to just sit outside with an excellent spontaneously-fermented beer, I found myself counting bikes as they rode by… which turned into a comparison of bikes and cars, and then an excuse to idly tabulate anything different about the bikes… One lost notebook returned by a bartender in Sweden a few days later (long story), and I had this quasi-scientific summary of 30 minutes of traffic: ...

Bike signal, buffered lane, Chicago

Riding, solo, SF -> Fairfax -> Point Reyes -> Tomales Bay -> Sebastapol -> Santa Rosa. Tomales Bay Oyster Farm: Hwy 1 North: Wild Flour Bakery ...

I’m back from a euphoria-inducing 8-day, 600-mile bike camping tour across Iowa and Wisconsin. The ride combined RAGBRAI (a 15,000-person group ride across Iowa with pork chops, pie, live music, and beer in tiny towns along the way) and a solo ride across beautiful, rural Southwest Wisconsin. The mix of mostly good weather, wildlife (fireflies, startled rabbits, and red-winged blackbirds), friendly strangers, no email, the ability to improvise and change plans on the spot (the flexibility of carrying a tent…), and plenty of time to ride alone and drift between states of present observation and introspection are why I always come back to bike touring… ...