So two Saturdays ago, my girlfriend and I took a trip to Oakland so that she could go to wedding shower for her brother's fiancé. While she stuck around in the Oakland Hills to catch a ride to SLO for the shower, I rode across Oakland to Alameda to check out the Cycles of Change APC community shop (about eleven miles). It's a really great shop. I was super stoked to see people of color working in a community bike shop. I volunteer in one myself, and I've gone to an international conference for community bike shops. The population therein is almost entirely white radicals trying to serve communities of color, so the APC shop was refreshing.
After I left the shop, I took the ferry to San Francisco. I disembarked about 3pm, and I rode across the city (about eight miles). Now, it had been beautiful in the East Bay, and it had been beautiful on the bayside of SF. A couple of miles before I hit the coast, it became super foggy and totally overcast. I was no longer stoked.
I rode south when I hit the highway. It was cold. Through Pacifica, my glasses got damp from the fog. I've actually never been through Pacifica when it wasn't foggy. After this ride, I'm terrified to visit my friends in Portland. Too many years in Florida made me prone to seasonal depression - I get grumpy for weeks in Santa Cruz sometimes and it's not even that bad there.
The only sun I saw for the 80 miles between Golden Gate Park and nightfall was for about five miles on the north-side of Half Moon Bay. I soaked in as much as I could and then stopped for a burrito at Tres Amigos (a great place that's becoming my regular stop when riding down). The sky cleared up over me about 15 miles outside of Santa Cruz, but the fog over the ocean created a barrier between me and the yet to set sun.
All in all, it felt like the longest, coldest, loneliest ride that I've ever done. But, it was also my first time riding about 100 miles in a single day, which was cool. The following day, all I could do was watch netflix and stuff my face. I may not have been completely conscious again until Monday.
