Thursday, September 17, 2009

Second week, day 5

We're almost to San Francisco. The second week is coming to a close and I'll be leaving. The rest of the group will continue to Newport Beach Ca.

I was very nice to start with a jacket stuffed in the back of my jersey. As we left there were vineyards with silhouettes of mountains against the sky before the sun had risen. Before long were were deep in the dry creek vineyards with their rolling roads and sometimes pockmarked roads, but boy was it great to be out blasting around the corners and powering up the hills.

Before long we entered the Russian River vineyards with many famous wineries. One of the most unique is the Hop Kiln that was built in 1903 to process Hops, that were grown in the area before grapes.

We even passed the Korbel champagne winery before the SAG stop. A short more 10 miles (if you ignore the 12% grade) we got to the town of Occidental. I ran into Jim, Larry and Scott who was just finishing lunch. We lounged for a while before getting going, but I had one more stop. The bakery had a special milk shake, vanilla espresso. Um mm... two of my favorites on one shake, I just had to get one.

At that point I was only 15 miles from the end of the ride. The sun make the ride warm but it was nice cool whenever I passed under the shade of overhanging trees.

At about 10 miles from the end our direction changed so that we had a really nice tailwind. At one point I was maintaining 27 MPH, oh very nice.

The day ended much too soon as I pulled into the motel parking lot at about 2:30.

Distance 70 miles
attitude gained 2301 feet

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