Ride Summary

Distance: 41 miles
Climbing: 620 feet
Descending: similar
Difficulty: not bad
Link to workout in Strava

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After a delightful night with old boss/mentor and now friend David and his new-friend-to-me partner Robin, we all slept in a bit before a delightful vegan breakfast of soysage and bubble waffles. I decoded 10am was a good time to hit the road into a brilliant blue-sky day.

After about 6 miles of the smile-inducingly-named Fiddleyment road, I turned off onto a series of paths that made up most of the rest of the day - Dry Creek path, North Sacramento bike path, the Great American River Bike Path (which I had also ridden a different part of out of town), and then another seemingly unnamed MUP parallel to Interstate 80, heading out of West Sacramento and taking me most of the way into Davis.

It was interesting to discover that I'd been in the more affluent/rural portions of suburban Sacramento up til today, since things got notably less affluent. First devolving into small taquerias and tire stores instead of spacious and well groomed subdivisions, and then giving way to camps and groups of unhoused folks as I got a bit closer into North Sacramento. I felt the usual wishes that I could do more to meaningfully affect the housing crisis, and I suppose also felt a bit of the misery-loves-company vibe to see that other communities had tinges of what Portland is going through to some degree.

The trails were well maintaned and pretty clear of debris until I ended up parallel to the highway outside of West Sacramento, on a path reminiscent of the I-205 path in portland - noisy, exhaust-smelling, a bit littered and basically only there for getting one across a chasm, in this case the Yolo Bypass wetlands. Once I got into the city limits of Davis, the path still paralleled the highway but was more tree lined and less noisy, and I followed it direct to campus where I found a bubble tea place to sit and write until my Warmshowers hosts for the evening are back from an afternoon bike ride of their own. Hard to complain about riding 30 off-street paved miles today, despite some less-interesting 8+ mile straight shots without a turn (aforementioned tedium).

Davis is, as a friend warned me, filthy with bikes! From the penny farthing on the welcome to Davis sign, to the flood of bikes exuding from campus as I approached, to parking areas on campus with hundreds of bikes locked up in front of many different buildings...it's hard not to go bike-blind just due to being overwhelmed. I liken it to when I used to go nipple-blind while counting the thousands of riders in the videos we took from the world naked bike ride, back when I helped coordinate that massive ride and we held a "counting party" to do the post-ride census. Sitting on a campus corner, there are almost as many bikes going past as pedestrians, and both outnumber the cars here by a factor of around 100, no joke.

The weather today was pretty glorious, though I did get a taste of the wind as I turned due west. I expect that it'll make a bigger difference in my effort level over coming days, since Murphy's law suggests that the longer days - the next two are my longest planned at 70+ each day - will also be the windiest. But maybe - hopefully - Murphy and my premonition will be wrong. Still, happy to be riding in the relatively warm and very dry air versus Portland's liquid sunshine!

My Warmshowers hosts, Eleanor and Martin, are really friendly and kind and bikey and we had a lovely afternoon and evening talking bikes and pets and retirement. So glad to be a part of this community and wishing Portland weren't as overcrowded with hosts as it is, such that I rarely get contacted by visitors via the site since there are dozens of folks ahead of me in the search results for folks looking for a place to crash.