At 29 You Get Ice Cream

2458.4; 40.9

And I'm on the home stretch of a year owning this bike, trying for a little over 100 miles a week for the next four weeks to put it up near 3000 miles (any bets?).

I scouted Sweetwater Springs Road on Friday. It's an eight-mile back road with some pretty serious climbs, twists and turns, one-lane stretches, and a lot of cow gratings. Very little traffic, as it's mostly vineyards, ranches, and lumber mills. I decide today to just try to get to the top of the first big hill and not go too far down the other side (though it goes through to Armstrong Woods near Guerneville, the roads from there back home aren't very safe, as far as I've seen, so any hill I go down, I gotta come back up). About 2-1/2 miles in I reached one such pass and so turned around maybe a little earlier tan I'd've liked. That was 18 miles into the ride, so I still had other hills to climb. I stopped at the Wohler Bridge and looked at the map and decided to try a new way back. So instead of crossing Wohler bridge again, I went back to Westside Road and followed it to the end on River Rd. It was quite warm by now and I was "feeling the burn" from a weekend of no exercise, so I stopped at a little store I've visited one before on River Rd, now 29 miles into the ride. I was willing to pay 89 cents for a banana, because I was a little worried about cramping up. Also willing to buy a plastic bottle of water to somewhat refill my pack, and a Ben & Jerry's Cherry Garcia bar, just because I could (actually only ate half of that, but it WAS delicious). So from here, I didn't want to stay on River Rd., which has flocks of drunken teens driving 60mph with no shoulders (on the road, not the teens), and a guy I like to call "Inky" out there driving somewhere, who bought a 12-pack of Miller Genuine Draft, and whose tattoos ran all the way up his neck to his chin--won't HE be interesting if/when he's 65 and the jowls fall! So I found Martinelli Rd. on my handy SCBC BikeSonoma Map (and it IS a nice map and I'm glad to finally have one with me on these rides!

Martinelli Road was very pleasant after the frantic rush of River Road, but it delivered me onto a short uphill stretch of frantic, rushing Hwy 116, which ALSO had almost no shoulder and cars zooming by at 55-60mph. And "Inky" could well be coming up behind me at any moment, four of five beers into that 12-pack by now. But it was short, and soon I was back on the familiar bike path and home. So, almost 41 miles--it really felt like 50, given the heat and the climbing. And I'm certainly in good shape for a 100-mile week.