49 Mile Scenic Drive

As a result of still being a wee bit jet lagged, I got of to a fairly late start this morning.  The plan was to go for a ride somewhere, but first of all I still had some bike stores to visit in search of a bunch to join to ride out to Santa Rosa on Monday.  Since I hit all the bike stores downtown yesterday, today I took a bus down to the Mission district where there is another clump of stores all within a few blocks of one another.  The long and the short of it is pretty much everyone I spoke to thought I was kidding myself, as it's about 90km away on the interstate, and you're not allowed to ride on it, which means by the time you add some zig zags on the alternate route, it's maybe 120km+ each way.  The weather for Monday looks pretty horrible though, so as much as I'm keeping my options open, I might have to find something else to do.

Once I'd returned from my bike store run I decided it was high time I got on the bike.  By this time it was already past 3pm, but the west coast is on daylight savings time so sunset in San Francisco is around 8.30pm, so I figured I had a bucketload of time to get in 49 miles of the perhaps appropriately titled 49 Mile Scenic Drive.  It's been a long time since I've been in San Francisco at this time of the year, and one thing I'd forgotten about was fog.  Almost every day, fog rolls in late afternoon off the Pacific and settles around the San Francisco peninsula for the night, then burns off the next day once it warms up a little.  Having missed most of the morning in my jet lagged state, I missed the morning fog, but it would seem as though I spent the few hours of direct sunlight riding a bus rather than riding my bike.  Other than making for a particularly chilly ride, it also made navigation pretty difficult, since I didn't have a sun to reflect which direction I was traveling.  Needless to say, I missed a couple of turns and made a few wrong ones.

The drive does a loop around the peninsula, and cuts through most neighborhoods (or at least the ones that are worth seeing), and since San Francisco is famous for it's hilly streets and being surrounded by water, you get a good combination of hills and riding along the water (read : crosswinds), it's kind of like combining a ride along Beach Road and the Tour De Burbs.  While I didn't have any problems getting up any hills, there were some that were steep enough I had problems going down them, the main problem being there 4 way stop signs at the bottom of most of them.  I still don't know what the rules are with these intersections, but what I do know is I'll probably have to visit another bike shop in the next few days to replace my brake pads.  The only other problem I had with the ride is it wasn't even close to 49 miles, by my count it was closer to 39.  Sure, I might have missed a bit here and there, but I more than made up for it with my shoddy sense of direction in the fog.

My ride details can be found here, there's very little in the way of good training data to be garnered from it since I spent half the ride on the brakes and the other half wondering whether or not I was going the right direction, but it's something to look at, even if it is only to laugh at how many times I made wrong turns and had to turn around and go back.