Posts

RAGBRAI 2011 route announced. Not sure if I’ll go this year, but it’s a great time.

For variety, on Saturday I joined some people I know who were going on one of the AIDS LifeCycle training rides in the South Bay– a 46-mile loop, taking us from Mountain View (near the Caltrain station) through Cupertino, Saratoga, Los Gatos, and some towns I’d never heard of (Monte Sereno). It was a good workout and way to spend a chunk of the day, with one significant hill and a lot of fairly straight rolling-hill sections where you could get momentum going (while nominally a 10-12mph pace, the pack I was riding with made some solid 20-25mph pulls on the long flat stretches and the road flew by). However, the scenery was nothing special– lots of suburbs, strip malls, cars, and Starbucks. Given that and how slow Caltrain is, I’ll probably stick with mostly SF/Marin/East Bay rides in the future, or try some of the more woodsy (and hilly) peninsula rides.

It all started when I wanted to replace the completely functional plastic-coated downtube shift levers on my old french road bike: With some slick-looking shifters a friend gave me: Should be easy, right? Just cut the existing cables, replace the levers and string a new set of shift cables… wrong. The old shifters and threaded bosses on the frame were an unusual, non-standard thread, M5x1.0mm, which as far as I can tell mainly existed on 1970s French bicycles and is no longer made. The standard metric screws near that size are M5x0.8mm or M5x0.5mm (the same diameter, 5mm, but a different thread pitch). I knew from Sheldon Brown and previous work on the bike that old French bikes are “special” and, for example, one of the bottom bracket cups is threaded in the opposite direction from pretty much every other bike ever made. But I didn’t think this applied to even small-size, standard-looking screws. ...

New handlebar tape for the old french road bike (and new shifters, but that’s a longer story)

[ edit: cancelled due to early-morning rain, though it ended up clearing up– oh well ] Tentative plan: an Alpine Dam loop ride next Sunday (1/30), about 50 miles round trip from the Golden Gate Bridge (map), with some substantial but satisfying hills. Stopping in Fairfax at Gestalt Haus (run by the people behind the original SF Gestalt Haus before it changed ownership?) for some sausages & beer before heading home. Departure time TBD in the morning (early? mid-?) and a no-rider-left-behind pace as usual, though I definitely want to get back in the afternoon, before it starts to get dark and cold on the bridge.

Well, that was a great weekend. A group of 10 of us biked from SF to Montara (on the coast, between Pacifica and Half Moon Bay, about 30 miles), stayed overnight in the Montara Lighthouse Hostel ($28/night, includes linens, fully booked most Saturday nights months ahead of time but the web site availability is often incorrect– you can call them directly to make reservations, and should if you’re going with a group), and biked back the next day. ...

10 of us rode from San Francisco to Montara this weekend, stayed the night in the Montara Lighthouse youth hostel, then rode back. I’ll post a full map and photos later (edit: Ok, the SF->Montara ride has been posted) – to start, I’m just posting photos of Old San Pedro Mountain Road, our detour inland from Highway 1. From Short Bike Rides San Francisco (where I read about this route) “San Pedro Mountain Road is the old alignment of Highway 1 before Devil’s Slide was built.” It’s now closed to cars and overgrown, a mix of pavement, broken pavement, dirt, and light mud (still doable without a mountain bike, though). Some people in the biking community call it “Planet of the Apes Road”– not that it’s *that* decrepit, but once you know it used to be a road for cars, you can imagine you’ve come across a collapsed civilization. ...

Lighthouse, california bear, 10 bikes, at the end of a day of riding.

On our way

Preride coffee at four barrel.