Today was my 4th or 5th Port Costa / Carquinez Scenic Drive ride over the past four years and it was a good one (and with no flats or infected bee stings). Seven of us met up at Pleasant Hill BART and headed out for a late afternoon casual-pace 29-mile ride and picnic.
For variety, we took what looked like a side path along Alhambra– but it rapidly rose above the road and turned into a rough dirt path.
We forged ahead for another 12 miles of riding, past cows and brown (“golden”) dry grass up the curvy hills of McEwen and down into Port Costa. It’s a town that’s hard to describe if you haven’t been there– in some ways it feels like a frontier town from 100 years ago, but with motorcycles. But hey, the NYtimes did a brief piece on it recently, with this bit of history:
“Port Costa was founded in 1879 as a landing for the steam-powered ferries that took trains from Benicia across the one-mile-wide Carquinez Strait. […] In its heyday, Port Costa was one of the biggest grain ports on the West Coast, with around 3,000 residents. Population plummeted in 1930 when the Martinez railroad bridge opened, replacing the ferry crossing. Today, Port Costa has fewer than 250 inhabitants.”
Outside the one bar and restaurant we saw a man with a falcon on his shoulder, a man with strong opinions about bike components who scoffed at us for never having biked to Yosemite, and a man in a leather jacket carrying a whip and a huge sheathed knife, among other characters.
We sat on a railroad cart with what turned out to be a ridiculous picnic spread: pasta salad, potato salad (with mustard, dill, and olive oil), olives, pita + hummus + meat + cheese, avocados, cherries and chocolate, cookies, some sort of cheese pastry, and delicious peach + candied ginger mini-pies (made from peaches picked yesterday).
We also had to sample some of the 200+ beers available at The Warehouse Cafe (there might be more beers available than people in the town):
After that orgy of eating, we headed back, via the old and closed-to-cars Carquinez Scenic Drive. The evening light was great, with orange tints from the descending sun and long shadows, though those don’t really come through in these sweaty-cell-phone-while-biking photos.
From one history site: “Carquinez Scenic Drive used to be a well-travelled throroughfare from Martinez to Crockett. Then sometime during the 1980’s part of the road fell down the cliff, and was never repaired.” There were several sections like this, just above cliffs. Not somewhere you’d want to bike at night.
And after another 10 miles we were back on BART, just as it started to get dark. Great ride, everyone!