Last weekend, we did a couple of great rides. Saturday, we had 7 riders on Coker (actually 2 Cokers, 1 Creative Gecko and 4 Hunters), doing essentially a repeat of Gary Kanuch’s 39 mile Scenic Uni ride in San Francisco. Gary had re-ridden the route four more times to dial it in perfectly. Luckily it was a couple of miles longer, just enough to make 70km so we could use it as a ‘Alps Unicycle Tour’ qualifier ride. Bronson, Scot, Beau and myself plan to do that ride next August. Gary’s ride has over 800m of climbing and hits so many famous San Francisco sites that it’s a non-stop pleasure to ride. We started the actual ride at 8:15am and finished just after 6pm. We look forward to doing it every September for years to come.
On Sunday, for some reason, we let Rob pick the route even though he’s not even planning on doing the Alps Tour. Starting from his house in Santa Cruz, it went mainly up. After something like 14 miles, we had climbed at least 2400’ and finally got a little downhill. Beau and I were riding brakeless with 125mm cranks and didn’t like a sign we saw on the descent back to the ocean: ‘Warning, 10% grade next 2.4 miles, trucks use lower gear.’ That was quite a challenge. We will definitely have brakes and longer (or adjustable) cranks for the Alps Tour. Next up was a 1 mile section with quite a bit of uphill, into a very stiff headwind, with a horrible slope to the pavement (and of course heavy traffic). It’s good to practice riding in difficult conditions I guess. Lunch at the Taqueria in Davenport at 2pm was very welcome, then we had over 10 miles with very strong tailwind back to Santa Cruz.
Both rides were gorgeous and a blast. The weather this time of year is just so fantastic around here - I hope the rest of you are getting out and enjoying riding too.
This year’s photos at http://community.webshots.com/album/187327532RfuVQY
Gary’s writeup from the 2003 SF tour: http://www.bikediablo.com/39_mile_home.html
—Nathan