120+ miles, a group of 15 great people, sunny weather, lush farmland and shady redwood forests, a few exciting hills, the kindness of strangers, good beer, and an action-movie just-in-time finish… easily one of my favorites. Read on for a longer than usual writeup in story form, with photos and details…
Back in December I’d floated the idea of an overnight ride up to Russian River Brewing Co during the two-weeks-a-year Pliny the Younger release. Interest blossomed, we hashed out logistics, and by the day of the ride we were a group of 15(!): people I’d done long rides with as well as new friends-of-friends, on loaded touring bikes and sporty road bikes, people who’ve ridden centuries and people who’ve rarely biked more than 40 miles… and even someone who hadn’t biked more than 7 or 8 miles in a stretch (I’ll admit, I was a little worried, but he was a natural).
Here’s the high-level post-bridge route, based on a scouting ride, a solo Sonoma ride last summer, my favorite paper bike maps, Google Maps, and suggestions from a few other cyclists, valuing “scenic” over “most direct” while trying to keep it below 70 miles each way:
If you’re interested in trying this route, I also sketched out more detailed maps with turn-by-turn cuesheets and food and water stops, for both the 70ish-mile route up (SF -> Mill Valley -> Fairfax -> Nicasio -> Petaluma -> Santa Rosa) and the 50ish-mile route back (Santa Rosa -> Petaluma via Stony Pt Rd -> Nicasio -> Lucas Valley Rd -> San Rafael -> Larkspur -> Larkspur ferry), and just to be over-organized, a little trip guide.
On to the ride itself…
We started at 7:30AM in an empty Four Barrel Coffee:
After collecting our group across the city, we crossed the bridge (no conflict with pedestrians this early!) Unusually, the headlands were fog-free and sunny:
We skipped through Sausalito and along the Mill Valley Bike Path (something I’ve done so often it slips by without thinking), then up Camino Alto, cheered at the top by some strangers with a cowbell (probably for cyclists we saw training for ALC). The usual twists and turns (see the cuesheet above, or just follow bike route 15 to Ross and then 20 to Fairfax) brought us to Gestalt Haus in downtown Fairfax.
Alas, it and Lydia’s across the street were both closed. But while we stood milling about, the owner poked his head out and invited us in, firing up the grill earlier than usual. We took over the entire wall-mounted bike rack:
Sausages (in my case, two) and a warm-up beer (a light, refreshing Kölsch) energized us for the next leg:
I’ll make an exception to my anti-animated-GIFs stance for this one:
We relaxed there for a while, chatting with the friendly owner and listening to music he’d recorded off the sound board at various live rock shows.
Time to move on. Up we rode on Sir Francis Drake before turning right towards Nicasio. Immediately, the traffic thinned out and we had a series of small hills through the woods:
Past the tiny Nicasio fire department and reservoir we turned towards Petaluma. The hills were lush and green— a far cry from the “golden” (brown) grass I’m used to seeing later in the season.
We hit a larger hill and spread out a bit, regrouping at the Marin Cheese Company for a snack. A few more hills (and my usual unintentional white lies, “just one more hill … well, I meant one more *big* hill, this one’s really only a half-hill, and this one doesn’t count because you can get some speed down the previous hill and get part way up, and this one has a scenic overlook half way up you’d stop at anyway, so it’s really two small hills in a row, and, and…”), past old and new wind turbines and cows, and a twisty swoop down into Petaluma proper:
A jog off of the usual roads let us ride through much of Petaluma on an alternately dirt and paved bike trail along a canal:
From there on, it was a few wide and flat streets with moderately heavy traffic but good bike lanes or shoulders to Santa Rosa, with music from the bike-mounted stereo Ellen brought motivating us to crank out those last 20 miles with minimal stops:
We’d heard rumors of a 3-4 hour wait to get in to Russian River Brewing on weekends during the Pliny the Younger season, and indeed there was a long line at 5pm. Two guys had even brought chairs and backgammon (shifting it down every 5-10 minutes) to pass the time:
After that much riding, we (or at least I) had no problem waiting around— we got pizza delivered to line, got some burritos, took side trips to the hotel to change and drop off gear, put some James Brown on the stereo, and day turned to night.
Seating for fourteen (we’d gained one and lost two) seemed like a tall order, but they took pity on us and let us take over the (chilly) outdoor patio and send a few scouts in to acquire beer, and later let us all inside. Success! We’d even worried they might run out of their daily allocation of Pliny the Younger before we could order one (it’s happened in the past), but we faced no such problem.
I thought Pliny the Younger was great, after half-expecting it to be an overhyped hop monster. It had a pine-resin-and-grapefruit scent, but was balanced, slightly malty, and less bitter and overwhelmingly hoppy than I expected (perhaps the 10.7% alcohol helped keep the bitterness at bay). We also had to pick up a 20-beer sampler, and the Damnation 23 (golden belgian-style ale, strong, aged with oak chips) and Supplication (sour ale aged in pinot noir barrels with cherries— very rare to find on tap anywhere except the brewery) were group favorites.
Their pizza’s also good, I’d recommend the Excell (pesto, sausage, caramelized onions, spinach, mozzarella).
We whiled away the evening there, failed to convince them to give us a discount on a bike jersey (thanks for trying, friends),and some of us tucked in early, some had dubious conversations with locals in the hot tub at the retro-chic Flamingo Resort (just $99/night for a two-bed room, they let you bring your bike into your room, and unlike some of the motels I’d looked into, no long lists of 1-star reviews on tripadvisor related to late-night drug busts in the parking lots and swarms of roaches…), and some of us detoured up to Healdsburg for a late-night Allagash Black… but that’s another story.
SUNDAY.
Our fuzzy “meet at 8:30, roll at 9” plan evolved into “roll at 9… over to the IHOP across the street and debate the various calories-per-dollar options” (near the top, the Chicken and Spinach Salad, with a horrifying 1600 calories, 118 g fat, and 2340 mg sodium).
In any big group, some people will be bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and antsy to start earlier, and some will want to nurse their coffee and water and take their time— but everyone kept their cool.
Hitting the road later and slightly sore from the previous day elevated the idea of catching a ferry back to SF from Larkspur, still a solid 50+ mile ride, but one that would let us skip about 20 miles of the more repetitive near-SF riding (and avoid riding in the dark if we didn’t make good enough time). Hey, I’d been excited all along to finally ride on Lucas Valley Road, and perhaps get a late lunch at the amazing Sol Food in San Rafael, so it was a plan.
I picked Stony Point Rd from Santa Rosa to Petaluma partly because it was a straight shot with minimal second-morning mental effort required: about 20 miles on a single road, without worrying about looking for turns. And it turned out to be a good road as well— some farms, rusted tractors, a bike lane or shoulder most of the way, and good pavement once we got the first few miles of light rubble and broken glass out of the way.
It was here that we had our only flats of the trip… four of them, as well as some bike spring and brake problems that took up some time. No big deal— we were all in it together, and we had all the tools we needed. It’s good the people with flats were so prepared, though— another 10 minutes fixing flats at this point would have changed the whole afternoon… (*dramatic foreshadowing*)
Back through Petaluma, we hit the longest hill of the trip— the climb up out of Petaluma on D St, where the twists and turns taunt you: “maybe the summit is just around the corner— I don’t remember it taking so long on the way down”.
Everyone made it to the top, cheered on, and we took a break to reactivate our pancreases.
At this point, I realized we probably wouldn’t make the last Larkspur ferry of the day (4:30pm), as our average pace so far would drop us there 30-60 minutes too late, and I only expected us to get more tired as the day went on (though we had just finished a slow uphill and a series of bike repairs, which skewed our average pace artificially low).
Don’t hate me, fellow riders, when you read this, but I silently considered taking us on an alternate route through Novato and along (or on) the 101 for 20 miles, which might have been shorter and less hilly and increased our chances of catching the ferry… but decided not to bring it up. It would have been so much less scenic! Well, and also, since I hadn’t scoped out that route ahead of time, I saw a real chance of getting us lost on industrial back streets along the way or wasting precious minutes planning it out.
So we kept to the original plan and cut our stops short.
Back through Nicasio, a left turn onto Lucas Valley Rd, and— a gorgeous segment of riding through redwoods that I highly recommend:
At some point, I handed off informal sweep duty to Vince (riding with the rear group, to ensure no one without a patch kit and pump falls off the back of the pack, gets a flat, and gets left behind), sprinted to the front up a gradual uphill, and did a quick map check on my phone with 8% battery remaining.
The whole group was keeping up a brisk pace, and was only a minute or so spread out.
The good news: over the past 2 hours, we’d made up most of the needed time. The bad news: at least at Google Maps speed, we’d still miss the ferry by at least 10 minutes out of the 50 we had left (not even counting the fact that we needed to find the right dock and buy tickets before boarding).
Someone who worried he was holding the rest of the group back said we could just tell him the route to SF and we could race ahead to the ferry— but that’s not the way we ride. Glances were exchanged, some trite phrase like “let’s do this” or “let’s roll” was uttered, and we took off as a group.
We swooped down from the summit of Lucas Valley into San Rafael at 35+ mph, all managing to avoid two major potholes (marked with spray paint by someone— thank you, stranger). Since I’d never taken this route but had turns jotted down on paper, we worked in teams— with someone hanging back at critical turns to make sure no one missed them, while a few of us rode ahead to sanity-check the route and make any needed decisions without holding up the rest of the group.
We seemed to be making good time before an unexpected modest-size hill on Los Ranchitos (I passed a slow-cycling kid and her father, and later heard that one of us farther back involuntarily cursed out loud when he saw the hill ahead, then was mortified to have done that in front of a young child).
Most of the way into San Rafael, bike route 5 with signposts into San Rafael presented itself to the side of the road, parallel to the 101. That hadn’t specifically been on the cue sheet I’d jotted down, but it sounded faster than the road, right? We shifted onto it and I briefly regretted the decision— it took us down between two rising concrete walls, and it was unclear when we’d be able to exit it. Despite ambiguous signage, we made the right call on where to exit, cut over to Lincoln, and cranked our way past a shopping mall and through San Rafael (no time for a stop at Sol Food). So close! You know, we might just make it if we don’t hit red lights or take any wrong turns.
A final race out of San Rafael, through the new-ish Cal Park Tunnel, across a busy street, and the front of the pack rolled in to the Larkspur Ferry Terminal with about four minutes to spare.
The ticket machines were open, we bought a stack of tickets as everyone caught up, someone realized we were waiting on the wrong ferry ramp, and everything fell into place.
With minutes to go, we boarded the last ferry of the day as a group, hung up our bikes, and watched as Larkspur disappeared behind the wake.
Whew. High fives all around.
There were so many places that day we could have lost an extra four minutes and been stuck biking the last 25 miles into San Francisco as it got dark and wet (rain was forecast starting at 4 or 5pm, though it’s unclear if it ever fell).
What a weekend. Thanks, everyone.