After several weeks of craptastic weather, we finally caught a break this weekend and had sunny skies and relatively high temperatures. I had forgotten how just a little sunshine can really brighten your mood after seemingly endless rainy gloom. I had planned on riding both Saturday and Sunday, but on Friday night I went to a tiki bar with a friend and had waaaay too many mai-tais. I was wreck on Saturday and barely managed to leave the apartment, so, no ride on Saturday.
But after a good night's rest and lots of fluids, I was a new woman, and decided to take a nice long spin over in the San Ramon valley. This ride has been my standard longish flat ride for a while now; the scenery is nice, it follows bike routes and paths almost the entire way, and it's relatively flat so you can really get going (assuming there are no strong headwinds, which can be an issue in spots). Anyway, given that I've done this ride so many times, I was surprised that I had never blogged it before. It's very similar to both the Orinda-Palomares ride and the Orinda-Union City ride, it just terminates at a different BART station.
This is another BART to BART ride, beginning at Orinda BART and ending at Fremont BART. There's a very gradual incline (it's hard to even call it a climb) out of Orinda heading into Moraga, but beyond that, it's flat smooth sailing for the next 35 miles or so, through Lafayette, Walnut Creek, Danville, Dublin, and Pleasanton. Today there were absolutely no headwinds, maybe a bit of a tailwind even, so I flew through the first 30 miles of the rides in about 2.5 hours. That was with a 20 minute stop at Starbucks. Past Sunol I took Niles Canyon road back to the bay side of the hills. This road has always been a bit sketchy (it's highway 84 with just two lanes and a disappearing shoulder) but it's become even worse lately. They've widened the center divider, adding those bumpy things, without doing anything about the shoulder. Basically they've reduced the shoulder even further, which is a ridiculous hazard for cyclists given the speed of the traffic. And this is on a known and popular bicycle route. It's a real shame because this road goes through a beautiful canyon with the creek and a historic railway line. It could be a nice bikeway linking Pleasanton/Sunol with Fremont, but it looks like they're taking it in the other direction.
Animules: all kinds of roadkill on Niles Canyon, including 4 dead skunks.
Total Distance: 48 miles
Elevation gain: about 1200 feet
Time in the Saddle: 3.5 hours
Route (on bikely.com): Orinda-Fremont
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment