After a few months mostly off the bike (other than the dumpling tour and a cool grey city ride), getting my legs and finding the joy again riding up San Bruno Mountain in the chilly fog with friends. I’ll start organizing again this spring…
I’ve been enjoying Cool Gray City of Love and taking notes every time he mentions an interesting vista, path, or historical intersection in SF I haven’t been to. So… it seems worth a periodic ride around the city to check out some of them. This Saturday, a Mission / Glen Park / Sunset route, including: Several notable staircases (we’ll lock bikes at the bottom and hike up for views), two of the very few remaining old unpaved road segments in SF, Billy Goat Hill, and some of the last remaining evidence of the great sand dunes that once blanketed the Sunset. ...
Three times makes a tradition– after last year, I had to do it again– organize a bicycle tour of my favorite dumpling shops for friends and strangers through the SF Bike Coalition (picking up hundreds of dumplings as takeout to eat in a nearby park). I spent the previous weekend scouting, test-riding, and test-eating, and put together a route combining low-key roads, paved off-road paths through Golden Gate Park, and riding along the ocean… with stops for last year’s group favorite (pan fried pork buns and ‘soup dumplings’ from Dumpling Kitchen, eaten in a small park nestled above Stern Grove), the chicken and Chinese spinach dumplings from Kingdom of Dumpling (most notable for the intensely pleasurable fiery orange chili sauce) ferried all the way to a strip of trees and benches at Judah and Great Highway, and new-to-the-ride Shanghai Dumpling King for the eponymous dumplings and ‘dessert’ in the form of sweet BBQ pork buns plus a few other sweet dumplings from across the street, eaten in a nearby playground. ...
Pre-work ride across the bridge and up Hawk Hill.
According to a few friends, cycling wasn’t previously a major part of Mexico City culture (not totally surprising in a massive, sprawling, 20M-person metro area with thinner 7300′-elevation air, heavy traffic, a good subway system, and moderate air pollution), but in the past five years it’s started to take off. Bike infrastructure (including barrier-separated bike lanes) has gone up around the city, and as of 2010 there’s a major city bike share program in place, EcoBici: ...
Muévete en Bici (Sunday Streets, Mexico City– 40ish km of roads closed to cars including the major 8+ lane Paseo de Reforma– and people of all ages and fitnesses out en masse on bikes)
Early pre-work ride to the ocean and Andytown
An all-afternoon ride from Fremont BART to the shoreline, under the Dumbarton bridge, then up along the water all the way to San Leandro– riding on levees stretching out into the Bay, past green-tinted salt evaporation ponds, pelicans, egrets, herons, vultures, and a red fox, through landscapes moon-subdued in palette but with occasional brilliant splashes of color, on paved paths and dirt… a great day. Riding into the fierce, relentless headwind slowed us down, and the occasional sections of bone-rattling gravel numbed the hands, but we all made it around the levees, on trails where we saw few other humans. ...
An excellent one-night bike camping trip to the Oakland hills, S24O-style. Knocking wild plums out of a tree after a long, swooping descent down Pinehurst: Camping among the eucalyptus in Anthony Chabot park. ...
I needed a ride, and hopped the Vallejo ferry without the usual plan. A little phone browsing on the way across turned up some bike paths and sections of The Bay Trail West of Napa that I’d never seen, and it seemed like Lagunitas Brewing in Petaluma would be within reach… A bit of Bay Trail along a river and a marsh… thick with vocal birds but otherwise deserted, eventually degrading to dirt and then gravel and leading to nowhere (a vista point, and a loop back to the beginning of the trail). ...