For many years I’ve been curious to try the transit (train and bus) method of getting to Yosemite Valley, and potentially bring my bike along… and I finally did it: Read on for some logistics notes, though exact train and bus timetables and web links change year to year and season to season, so you’ll want to look up schedules yourself… ...
I’ve biked to the Santa Cruz / Capitola / Watsonville coast a handful of times, but this is my new favorite route from San Jose (BART or Caltrain), using the one-lane, often-empty Mountain Charlie Road: Most routes I’ve seen start the same: Take the Los Gatos Creek Trail from San Jose to Los Gatos (mostly paved, with some mild gravel bits and one very short but steep bit of gravel as you approach Lexington Reservoir) ...
I highly recommend the Crosstown Trail, a grassroots-developed 17-mile hiking route across San Francisco that strings together existing paths through parks, urban greenways, stairs, and the bits of road needed to connect them. There’s an associated bike route that combines parts of that trail with parallel road routes where it would be impractical to ride (though even this route also includes some carry-your-bike staircases and narrow dirt paths). Just imagine, you can experience all of this within the city limits: ...
I enjoy mixing some gravel and dirt into my road rides, though I don’t have a specific “mountain” or “gravel” bike– just my all-around bike with 38mm tires. A local example I’ve enjoyed several times in the past few years is Wildcat Creek Trail, which takes you from Wildcat Canyon Park in Richmond up to Tilden Park in the Berkeley hills. It’s a good local introduction to gravel roads (and nice and wide compared to a typical multi-use trail, avoiding conflict with walkers and dogs), and I’ve brought along friends on road bikes and they’ve been able to handle it: ...
A few years back I met a friend who lives in Berlin and we spent a week biking to Copenhagen. It turns out we had compatible cycle touring styles, and said “let’s do this again some time… especially if I’m ever somewhere in Europe within a reasonable take-your-bike-on-the-train distance from Germany". Other vacation plans brought me to Slovenia, so we schemed up a week of self-supported cycling in Slovenia and a bit of Croatia, on a mix of paved and gravel roads. ...
(this is a short recap post with some photos, perhaps some day I’ll come back and write more when I have the space to fully wrap my head around what just happened) Ever since I first visited Japan, one of my dreams has been to do a long-distance bicycle tour there, with a focus on rural areas (as well as the food, history, craftsmanship, and culture). “Some day, life’s too busy… maybe when I’m 65…”– but after a career change, I made it happen this year. It was one of the most memorable trips of my life. ...
(This is a placeholder writeup with a few photos, perhaps I’ll come back some day and flesh it out…) I spent a week cycling the length of Korea (~400 miles from Seoul to Busan), as a fully supported** ride with an organized tour group and about 20 strangers (though a few I’d met on a bike tour in Vietnam the previous year). By the end I felt exhilarated, challenged, stimulated, and full of great food. ...
Last summer (2022) I biked from ~Berlin to Copenhagen with a friend. A week of gorgeous riding on pavement and some dirt, carrying all our gear but staying in hotels to avoid the need for camping equipment, through a mix of rural landscapes, quaint towns, and cities. It started with flying into Berlin, checking my boxed bike and a lightweight duffel bag that just held two panniers of gear. I reassembled the bike in a train station in the city, hooked my panniers onto it, wadded up the duffel bag in the bottom of one of the panniers, and rode away… ...
Bornholm: a large Danish island in the middle of the Black Sea, reached by ferry from Sweden, Germany, or Poland. It’s relaxing, lush, pastoral… and some might even say a little boring. I love it– there are smokehouse for fish (optionally served with an egg yolks), a few cute towns, breweries, ice cream, beaches and forests… and most notably for this blog: ~230km of interconnected cycle trails around and through the island. ...
Morgan Territory Road was one of my favorite Bay Area roads four years ago (see that post for more details), and a few weeks ago a group of us finally made it back. The ascent and descent on windy one-lane roads with minimal traffic were even better than I remembered (riding on a cool day helped): This time, for variety, I charted a new route (44mi, 2800’ climbing) with a more roundabout intro/outro, picking up a range of paved and gravel trails through various parks, to take us off the busy + boring suburban roads. This probably added at least an extra hour (partly due to riding slow on multi-use trails with more pedestrians and dogs) but I felt they were a great addition. A few examples: ...