Skip to main content

Early arrival

The Bay Area pretty much has only two seasons, each with plenty of variations, but it's really just the Rainy Season and the rest of the year. The rainy season by most estimations begins on November 1st and depending on who is defining it, runs through the end of January or sometime in April. Today's storm is therefore just a bit early.

Sometime overnight, the rain from this storm began and we can usually tell the nature of the storm by which window the rain splats against. This storm has wind and rain coming from the south-southeast and it seemed pretty mild then given the weather alerts. I got a late start out the door on my commute to work, and riding though my neighborhood the storm didn't seem all that bad. Lots of twigs and leaves on the roadways, but otherwise not much. However, as I made my way south toward Emeryville, the wind and rain began to intensify. My preferred route takes me along the Bay Trail and around the west side of Golden Gate Fields race track on Flemming Point, where the pavement runs right up to the bay shore. Climbing the hill that connects the two parking lots, I got hit full on with the rising wind and I watched with amusement as the rainwater runoff was pushing fairly large sized gravel down hill.

While there were no other cyclists on the trail, I could tell that car traffic on the adjacent Interstate was a bit higher than usual. Crossing the Berkeley Bike Bridge with the wind rising even more, I got to feel the wind as a tail wind, though only briefly, as I rolled down the east ramp into Aquatic Park. The park is in fairly low laying terrain and with major storms the east side multi-use path is often underwater in several places. Flooding like that often causes egrets, great and little, to congregate and loiter on the grassy areas nearer to the train tracks, and I scared a flock into flight as I made my way south toward Shellmound.

My daily route takes me along one of Emeryville's Bicycle Boulevards, mine being the Horton Street boulevard and all the buildings built in the last decade provide shelter from the wind. Upon arriving at work, that is when the winds really picked up and the sound on the metal roof of our saw-toothed building is amplified, making the storm seem more intense. On my ride in I had a warm shower, dry clothes and a bowl of hot oatmeal to look forward to, and for my ride home I look forward to a hefty tailwind.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Where is Rob?

 Every four years, the Audax Club Parisien (ACP) will hold their Paris-Brest-Paris (or PBP) Randonneur event. There has been an amateur version of PBP since 1931. However, PBP has existed in some form since 1891, though back then it was a race, held about every 10 years until 1931 with a gap for the war, and then for the last time as a race in 1951. The take-away though is that PBP is no longer a race, there is no first and last place and the only metric to assess riders really is one of pass/fail. You either finish in the time limit, or you don't. Currently, PBP offers three start groups: 80 hours, 90 hours and 84 hours, in order of start. Each group will broken up into start waves with somewhere north of 200 (250?) riders in each wave. Under the direction of the ACP, Randonneurs USA (RUSA) sanctions qualifying events for PBP of 200, 300, 400 and 600km, each with a time limit. RUSA administers regions through out the US and there are five of those in Northern California, one in C...
Post a Comment
Read more

2007 PBP, Part 1: Arrival and departure

On the Sunday before the start of the 2007 Paris-Brest-Paris (PBP) Randonnee, a large number of Northern California riders gathered after the mandatory, but this year much abbreviated, bike inspection. We sat at a cafe, indoors alas, and tried to ignore the falling rain outside. My friend Reid made a waggish remark about the experience we were about to have. He said that doing Paris-Brest-Paris in the rain could be quite easily simulated at home by standing in a cold shower in bicycling clothing while ripping up $100 bills. I thought about this remark and in the the long, dark hours of the first night's ride through the French countryside, and with the rain beginning to pelt us once more, I came to the conclusion that the analogy was inadequate. What was missing in the comment was that it failed to include any mention of first having to stand in line to get into the cold shower. Having now commented on the inadequacies of the analogy (and pausing briefly to state that I completed...
3 comments
Read more

SFRs' Mendocino Coast (née Fort Bragg) 600km brevet: A history and stats (updated March, 2025)

The Mendocino Coast 600km is not the most frequently run SFR event and it isn't the one with the most participants in a given year, but as there is a notion of progressively longer events within our 'PBP Qualifiers', the Mendocino Coast 600km has some luster as a 'signature' brevet. History The route from SF to Fort Bragg and back is attributed to Daryl Skrabak though it is listed on the RUSA site as submitted by Todd Teachout who was the SFR RBA when route numbers were first assigned to existing and new routes. According to RUSA records, this route was first run in 1999 with Daryl Skrabak as RBA. Much like PBP itself, though not for the same reasons, the Mendocino Coast 600km was not run every year. Daryl ran the brevet once in 1999, and after that it was next run in 2004 under 2nd year RBA Todd Teachout. Todd listed the event again in 2005 through 2007. After a gap year in 2008, the event was again run, this time by 2nd year RBA Rob Hawks with subsequent ver...
1 comment
Read more