449 km

It is now April and I've managed to go more than three months without riding a permanent route. That is three months in Winter! The San Francisco Randonneurs and Santa Rosa Cyclists offered nearly a dozen different rides in those months, keeping me so busy I didn't need to ride a perm to get any RUSA events in. A while back Kirk had suggested a camping weekend up in Mendocino to ride a perm route along with a bunch of other friends. That never came to be, but we kept the idea of riding a perm together alive and in the end we settled on the one way route from El Cerrito to Davis via St. Helena and the Model Bakery ,and a return via Amtrak. The route first began life as a DART route when The Davis Bike Club hosted their first ever DART event in November of 2012. The route morphed into a permanent route later that year and in the coming year it will be a brevet route, part of another SFR double brevet weekend (used mostly to help train up for PBP). The route has some nice stre...

Despite the threat of rain, 75 riders lined up to do the 2014 version of the SFR Hopland 400km. As per usual, my goal is to ride with someone for the day rather than spending time alone, and yet in the hubub of the start I can't locate my intended riding partners. In the early miles of the Lower Marin maze I follow Max and Aron through the chain of small towns but various traffic controls work to set me back and they speed on ahead. The threat of rain became more ominous as we climbed Camino Alto and turned into a reality as we were still in the very early miles of the route. By the time most riders cleared White's Hill, the rain was pelting down pretty good. So much for skirting by the weather cell. Northwest Marin is mostly open grazing land and without the obstructions of suburbia we can often catch glimpses of the other riders on the brevet. I was impressed by Jon who seemed to not even notice the rain and powered along Chilenos Valley Road not yet wearing a rain jacket ...