 |
The track of my ride from "Run The Map" phone app. |
After a hectic early summer I have finally gotten to my century ride! Inspired by the success of the reverse path of my Yankee Jims rides, I decided to reverse direction of my usual route to Grass Valley, going through Auburn and Meadow Vista, then following Dog Bar Road up to Grass Valley.
 |
On Dog Bar Road. |
This turned out to be a good choice. The climb up to Grass Valley took place during the cool morning hours, and Dog Bar Road seems to take on a completely different character going from south to north! I was in Grass Valley early enough that I didn't feel any need to stop for food. I did eat half of a PBJ sandwich I was carrying and drank a little.
Next was the descent on highway 20. Going the other direction, this is a challenging, long effort to get into Grass Valley. But going this way, it's a sweet descent with an occasional bump. I left Hwy 20 at the Smartsville turnoff. At this point I made a significant deviation from my old century route, instead of turning on Waldo road and riding gravel to Camp Far West, I stayed on Smartsville Road and proceeded to the valley.
 |
On Smartsville Road, heading down into the valley. |
This is a wonderful road. It's very open and you can see a long way. (This is a very good spot to ride a motorcycle...fast!!). Thankfully, there was no strong winds, I could see that being a problem some days.
This road eventually took into the eastern fringe of Linda, then I took some wonderful country roads to Highway 65 just above Wheatland. There I made my only supply purchase of the day at a gas station food mart, some cold water and a Frappacinno.
From Wheatland it was a familiar route to Sheridan, then Dowd road to Nicolaus road and into Lincoln, then 193 to Sierra college and then up and over the hill back to Loomis.
 |
Basic ride stats. |
All in all I was very happy with this ride. I definitely prefer this route over my old way. I also noticed that the old way was probably not really 100 miles! But with the long gravel stretch at Camp Far West probably made up for that shorter distance. I felt pretty good after this ride. Even my bottom was in good shape, thanks to the Sugoi Evolution bib shorts I recently bought, and a slight change in saddle position, (I raised the nose of the B-17 just a tad.)
 |
Here's a shot of the Mercian post-ride.
|
No comments:
Post a Comment