This year's century ride.

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.