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… ...
Another quick vignette video from cycling across Southern India (on a supported tour, with a group of friendly strangers). We’d gradually ascended the Western Ghats mountain range over the previous few days… then descended the other side on a single beautiful, curvy, 20km-long downhill. I recorded the whole descent, but clipped out about 90 seconds that capture the vibe:
Cycling India: Tea Country. After getting back from six weeks of bike touring, I’m trying something new and making a few quick highlight videos with footage I recorded. This is the first one.
I rarely do anything with videos I record, but I’ve done a quick edit of the San Jose -> Santa Cruz ride (details in previous post) into a three minute memory.
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) ...
And… here I am, riding my bike in the heat and humidity of Kerala, India. I’ve posted a few updates across fragmented islands of social media like Instagram / Strava, or group texts… but plenty of folks I know don’t use those sites. So I’m looking into posting updates here to link back to (though it’s not quite as easy on my phone while traveling). I’ll at least post a summary here later, after the tour, as usual. ...
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: ...
With a bit of a train assist, it’s possible to be casually riding through wine / cider / beer country in central Sonoma County (roughly within the Santa Rosa - Guerneville - Healdsburg triangle), on the Joe Rodota Trail and West County Regional Trail: In my stronger days, I’d biked to Sonoma County all the way from SF or Oakland in a day (~70-100 miles one-way); I wrote up some of these rides as SF -> Russian River Brewing (Santa Rosa), SF->Petaluma-and-back, SF->Healdsburg overnight, and so on. But I’m not really interested in (or capable of?) a ride that long these days– 40-50 miles is my current sweet spot for an extended social ride with plenty of stops and exploration. ...
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: ...
Last weekend I organized a ride up to Point San Pablo, about 40 miles of scenic, mostly-flat* riding, with the majority of it on paved separated bike paths (the Bay Trail, on-street bike paths in Richmond, the Richmond Greenway, and the Ohlone Greenway). We had a good group of seven, some who I’ve been riding with off and on for years and some new folks. And the remarkable exchange between two people of: ...