Napa Valley Ride April 2006 - Sacramento Road Cruisers

RIDE REPORT:

Howdy SRCs,

Given the weather this year I'm going to redefine my own definition of a
prefect day to ride, to "any day that I ride safely and have fun!"

With that I can say that Saturday's ride was perfect.

I met up with Frank, Sparky and some guests (Al & Debra) at Lyon's to
ride to Napa valley, or more specifically Calistoga. From the start
there were clouds, but nothing that looked to be large rain makers, so
off we rode.

The ride out of town was un-eventful, except for one small detour onto
the freeway near the airport as the "frontage road" was under water.
Here we go through all the trouble of staying away from most mountain
roads due to the snow and now we have to watch out for flooded roadways.
Anyway we only had to ride about 5 miles or so and we were back off the
freeway and onto surface streets...

At our first stop in Winters, Sparky suggested that we take the "long
way" and snake along Lake Berryessa, and since I've only rode this way
once before I turned the lead over to him and I fell in as sweep.

It turned out this was a good decision as the roads were more or less
empty which made the ride that more enjoyable. We did come across a few
rocks on the road and in a couple of places there was water running
across also, but nothing too bad to make us change our route.

We ate lunch at that little place across town that serves up the nice tri-tip.
Given that Gundi could not make this ride, I bought two tri-tips "to go"
for dinner for her and I later on and ordered the hot link sandwich for
lunch, which made my forehead sweat, eyes tear up and cleared my
sinuses.

I can safely say that this did not happen to me alone, as we all had
similar experiences with our lunches, not that any of us were
complaining, it was just an observation.

Like all our rides the conversation over lunch bounced around, but ended
up all about bikes, rides and routes!

The ride home was just as enjoyable as the ride out, with nothing but
nice roads and scenery.

All in all another great ride is in the books.

And not to forget let's all welcome Al and Debra to our club as our
newest members!!! :)

John