Retiring bikeit.tumblr, moved site to velodromedary.com
I've had this bike blog on Tumblr since 2009...
I'm keeping the blog, and still post occasionally to it (in fact, the past year or two I've tried to shift more of by bike writeups off of walled-garden social media to this site, as many friends have fully quit or cut back on using the big-name social media). But I'm finding Tumblr itself slow and buggy and almost no one I know uses it any more. So, I've finally moved this to a standalone static site, at http://www.velodromedary.com/
(that domain pointed at this tumblr for the past few years, but I finally made the switch on the back end-- I won't be updated tumblr any more)
For many years I've been curious to try the transit (train and bus) method of getting to Yosemite Valley, and potentially bring my bike along... and I finally did it:
Read on for some logistics notes, though exact train and bus timetables and web links change year to year and season to season, so you'll want to look up schedules yourself...
A few possible levels of "bike intensity" for this trip:
You could take transit without a bike, and just use the free Yosemite shuttles to get around.
You could rent a bike there (highly recommended even if you don't leave the Valley, just to ride on the ~12 miles of paved multi-use trails and between lodging, stores, and hikes)
You could bring a bike on transit for more flexibility, but still generally stay within the flat Valley (what I did this time-- good, but with a few logistics challenges).
You could bring a bike and tackle much more ambitious road rides on highways 120, 140, or 41 (for example to Glacier Point, or Tuolumne Meadows). In my bolder days I might have considered this, but the roads look narrow with minimal shoulders and the traffic (including vans and RVs) can be fast and heavy, so I was not interested. I've read that if you want to do this, it's best to do it very early in the morning on a weekday...
Side note: I did find a remote low-traffic dirt road route from Merced to Mariposa that I biked on my way home, swapping in four hours of cycling for an hour on the bus. I made a short YouTube video about the experience, but that's only tangentially related to the idea of "Yosemite, by transit" so I won't write more about it here.
Transit Details:
Take the Amtrak "Gold Runner" from Oakland to Merced (~3 hours), followed by the YARTS bus #140 from Merced to Yosemite Village (also ~3 hours). You can book this entire trip through Amtrak for convenience (which brands the YARTS 140 as Gold Runner Bus 15A), unless you want a custom connection time.
Schedules vary by season, but I found it convenient to leave Oakland early in the morning and arrive in Yosemite mid-afternoon. My particular connection gave me an hour layover in Merced which was long enough to go get some lunch-- unfortunately there's no food right around the station, but about 0.6 miles South on 16th St there are a lot of options-- I love the El Super Taco truck in a parking lot of food trucks. Having a bike makes this quick lunch jaunt easier.
The views out the window of the train (especially between Oakland and Antioch) and bus are potentially worth the trip on their own...
Bikes on Transit:
The biggest lesson is there's no standard system-- different trains and buses (even on the same route) have different places you need to stow your bike-- get there a little early and ask the conductor/driver of your particular vehicle.
Bringing a bike on the Gold Runner Amtrak was relatively easy and I wouldn't have any concerns about doing it again-- no need to disassemble or box it, you just ask the conductor where to put it. On some schedules, there's convenient end-of-car storage on specific train cars:
On other trains, you have to stow your bike in a cubby in the staff car-- they may ask you to bring it up yourself, or may take it from you. When you get to your destination station, hustle to that car and ask them how to retrieve your bike. Be flexible-- one time I was on a train that stopped with the staff car past the end of the platform, so it took some awkward wrangling and a steep step to get it out.
Bringing the bike on the YARTS bus was a bit fraught-- it worked for me, but the space available was limited (and YARTS says that space for bikes is first-come-first-serve and not guaranteed), so I don't think this would work if there were multiple other cyclists, or if the bus was packed with people with luggage on a peak weekend.
On the most common bus model, there's a large under-bus luggage compartment that I just laid my bike down in-- good thing I'm not precious about scuffs and scrapes, and I was getting off at the last stop. On a different bus model, the luggage bays were small, and I could only fit in my bike by taking off a wheel (and almost had to lower the seat). It fit, but I'm not sure there would have been room for a second full-size bike if the other bay was full of luggage.
This is a situation where a folding bike (or renting a bike in the park) might be more convenient, especially at busy times (I did this trip on a weekday to minimize crowds on popular hikes, and because that's when I got a last-minute campground).
Lodging:
If you're going by transit and only for a short visit, you'll probably want to stay right in the Valley rather than a distant hotel even if it provides a valley shuttle. I looked at various lodging options, including:
Ahwahnee Hotel-- absurdly expensive
Curry Village-- glamping, but still $200/night for an unheated fabric tent crowded together near other tents, which to me wasn't worth the convenience of not bringing camping gear
Drive-in campgrounds for ~$35/night such as Upper, Lower, and North Pines. This is what I chose this trip (they were fully booked months in advance but I snagged a last-minute cancellation a few days before my trip). Even though there were cars or RVs at most other sites, I felt I had plenty of space and it wasn't too noisy-- but it's not a wilderness experience.
There are some other campgrounds that are walk-in (or walk-your-bike-in) only, such as Campground 4 (which I hear can be "social" as each campsite is shared by multiple tents-- good or bad depending on your mood), or Backpacker Camp (normally only usable if you have a wilderness permit-- it's intended for the first night of a multi-day backpacking trip). I learned that if you arrive in the park by transit, you can get one night in Backpacker Camp ($8) even without a reservation... I considered it, but I wanted to stay for two nights so I just went with one of the drive-in campgrounds.
I also considered hotels along the bus route (Autocamp and Yosemite Bug), but they were both expensive enough and less convenient without a car-- even if the YARTS bus stops at them, it only runs a few times a day and it's unpleasant to have that level of time pressure when on hikes.
Biking around the Valley:
This is the whole reason to be here! I had a day and a half to bike, bask in nature, and do some hikes, and I think I biked every inch of the 12 miles of official paved trails, including some sections 4+ times as I roamed back and forth.
In conclusion, I'd do this again. If I were doing it with a small group of friends and not trying to ride the off-road dirt near Mariposa, I'd probably aim for a mix of bringing folding bikes if people have them and renting bikes in the park, to avoid the risk of YARTS not having room. But on my own, I like the flexibility of having a bike to go off on side quests like the Mariposa dirt ride mentioned above...
Another quick vignette video from cycling across Southern India (on a supported tour, with a group of friendly strangers). We'd gradually ascended the Western Ghats mountain range over the previous few days... then descended the other side on a single beautiful, curvy, 20km-long downhill. I recorded the whole descent, but clipped out about 90 seconds that capture the vibe:
Cycling India: Tea Country. After getting back from six weeks of bike touring, I'm trying something new and making a few quick highlight videos with footage I recorded. This is the first one.
I rarely do anything with videos I record, but I've done a quick edit of the San Jose -> Santa Cruz ride (details in previous post) into a three minute memory.
I've biked to the Santa Cruz / Capitola / Watsonville coast a handful of times, but this is my new favorite route from San Jose (BART or Caltrain), using the one-lane, often-empty Mountain Charlie Road:
Most routes I've seen start the same:
1. Take the Los Gatos Creek Trail from San Jose to Los Gatos (mostly paved, with some mild gravel bits and one very short but steep bit of gravel as you approach Lexington Reservoir)
2. Cycle around the East side of Lexington Reservoir on a beautiful paved and low-traffic Alma Bridge Road
3. Turn onto Old Santa Cruz Highway, a scenic two-lane road under towering redwoods. There's some traffic on this but it's generally fairly chill.
From here, there are many possible routes. This version involves turning onto Mountain Charlie road for some uphill, and then the payoff-- the quiet, narrow, slightly bumpy ride down on it, with occasional open views or clouds of mist depending on the weather.
I then turned onto Bean Creek Road (also very scenic downhill with light traffic) and Glen Canyon Road (slightly faster/busier downhill but still very reasonable to bike), with just a few blocks of busy Scotts Valley road traffic in between. From there, the route depends on where in Santa Cruz you're going.
Here's the route, about 43 miles and 3000' of climbing: https://ridewithgps.com/routes/54530790
I also took some video while riding to try to capture the vibe of the route, I've quickly edited it together here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KSr_NI8p-s
Andā¦ here I am, riding my bike in the heat and humidity of Kerala, India.
Iāve posted a few updates across fragmented islands of social media like Instagram / Strava, or group textsā¦ but plenty of folks I know donāt use those sites. So Iām looking into posting updates here to link back to (though itās not quite as easy on my phone while traveling). Iāll at least post a summary here later, after the tour, as usual.
I highly recommend the Crosstown Trail, a grassroots-developed 17-mile hiking route across San Francisco that strings together existing paths through parks, urban greenways, stairs, and the bits of road needed to connect them.
There's an associated bike route that combines parts of that trail with parallel road routes where it would be impractical to ride (though even this route also includes some carry-your-bike staircases and narrow dirt paths). Just imagine, you can experience all of this within the city limits:
I rode this route twice this year with friends, details continue below:
There's an overview of the trail as well and maps and cuesheets on the official site, and I especially like these maps of both the hiking and biking versions of the trail (consult the legend to see which is which). In case that link breaks in the future, I've cloned a ridewithgps route I found and have started to add markers for food, water, viewpoints to climb, and other stops we found along the way. Even with maps, we had to use our eyes when navigating-- some trails and turns are not obviously named, but there are some signs and hints from the contours of the land...
We split the riding over two days (months apart) to have plenty of time to sightsee along the way-- there are a lot of interesting things to look at if you're going slow. We also needed time to ride to and from BART, get lunch, and walk our bikes on a few steeper / rougher dirt sections (we were all riding our "everyday" bikes). On narrow trails whenever we encountered people (which we often did midday around Laguna Honda, but much less when we rode it a second time on a Sunday morning) we dismounted to be polite and turned it into a walk in the woods.
For our first "tour", we met at the Ferry Building, took a twisty shoreline-parks route down to Candlestick Point (avoiding 3rd Street completely), and rode the first 2/3 of the trail to Golden Gate Park, then stopped for lunch and detoured to visit Sunset Dunes park. This was our route (currently just a screenshot and not a clickable map, but see the RWGPS link above):
This was about 33 miles, and took us most of the day, about 7.5 hours(!) with all our stops and exploration.
The second time we toured it we started at Glen Park BART, rode the trail to Lands' End, then toured Sunset Dunes and rambled back to the Mission, something like this:
This was about 22 miles and my phone says we spent 6 hours together (though only 3 hours actually moving) when you add in birdwatching, climbing stairs to scenic viewpoints, and a casual lunch.
But enough about the maps, here are some more photos to convey the vibe. Riding from the Embarcadero down to Candlestick Point:
A new-to-me highlight was the Vistacion Valley Greenway-- multiple mid-block paved trails past community gardens and murals:
McLaren park views, a few staircases, and one steep bit of hill:
Between parks, a bridge over a highway:
Dirt trails near Laguna Honda Hospital:
Some of the later trails near Golden Gate Park and approaching Lands' End:
And some panoramic views along the way:
I loved both of these days as ways to explore the city-- I'd bike (or walk) this again in a heartbeat.
With a bit of a train assist, it's possible to be casually riding through wine / cider / beer country in central Sonoma County (roughly within the Santa Rosa - Guerneville - Healdsburg triangle), on the Joe Rodota Trail and West County Regional Trail:
In my stronger days, I'd biked to Sonoma County all the way from SF or Oakland in a day (~70-100 miles one-way); I wrote up some of these rides as SF -> Russian River Brewing (Santa Rosa), SF->Petaluma-and-back, SF->Healdsburg overnight, and so on. But I'm not really interested in (or capable of?) a ride that long these days-- 40-50 miles is my current sweet spot for an extended social ride with plenty of stops and exploration.
More recently, I've taken four trips with a similar blueprint: bike or take transit to the San Rafael Transit Center, take the SMART train to Santa Rosa, and bike 20-40 scenic miles from there, using multi-use paths where possible. I'll stop in Sebastapol or Forestville for lunch, stop later in Healdsburg or Windsor for a snack or beverage, then get back on the SMART train to head home.
Rather than write up every variant on this in detail (especially since SMART stations and track-adjacent multi-use paths are still changing year-to-year), I've put together a sort of choose-your-own-adventure map, merging variants on this trip I've done:
The above would be ~180 miles of riding, which I'd never do all in one trip. But here are a few interesting subsets of this route.
Doubly Transit-Assisted: (27-38mi):
For the shortest, most transit-assisted Sonoma County trails ride:
Take GGT bus 580 from El Cerrito del Norte BART (there are similar buses from SF) to the San Rafael Transit Center. Note that this bus runs once/hour and only has room for three bikes on a front rack, so this isn't really an option for a group.
Take the SMART train from San Rafael to Santa Rosa (comfortable, scenic, plenty of room for bikes)
Do this pleasant ~27 mile ride (or a ~38mile version if you include Healdsburg), ending at the Windsor or STS SMART stations. There are a lot of good food options in Sebastapol, and wine and beer options in Windsor at the end of the ride
Take the SMART train back to San Rafael
Take the GGT bus back to El Cerrito del Norte BART
I wrote up a recap of doing this with a friend in "SMART-assisted Sonoma Trails", though note that the Windsor station was not yet open so the last few miles to STS airport station are no longer necessary.
I've only biked this variant once-- while there's novelty in getting to Santa Rosa entirely on transit, to me it's not quite worth the time and logistics of connecting multiple forms of low-frequency transit in both directions, as this adds time and more need to stick to a specific schedule. Instead, consider:
Three-Piece Ride (70mi split into 20/30/20):
This is probably the most straightforward and group-friendly variant, I've done it a few times.
Bike to San Rafael (whether from Oakland/Berkeley on the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, or from SF over the Golden Gate Bridge), about 20 miles
Take the SMART train to Santa Rosa
Ride the above 27 or 38 mile Sonoma trails loop, ending at the end of the SMART line in Windsor
SMART train back to San Rafael
Ride back to Oakland/Berkeley/SF (20mi)
While this is 70-80 miles of riding, it feels easier than that, because it's broken into three rides with an hour of relaxing downtime on the train between each one. I usually plan to get to San Rafael at least 30min early on the way up, since the SMART train runs infrequently-- missing it due to a roadside flat or extra photo stops would be disappointing. That means we usually have buffer time in San Rafael to get food (Sol Food?), or at least some to-go pastries to eat on the train, and if we're running later we just get lunch on the other end.
This split ride also leaves open a last-minute option to skip the final 20-mile segment and catch a bus from San Rafael, if I'm riding solo or with just 1-2 friends (as noted, the 580 bus can only take three bikes). Even if you don't do this, knowing this safety net exists even for one person in a group if they are feeling exhausted when we get back to San Rafael can make the day feel less daunting. There's also a similar (and even more occasional) Larkspur -> SF ferry option if you're early enough in the day.
SMART Pathway San Rafael -> Santa Rosa? (+45mi)
As a variant on the above, you can (mostly) ride between San Rafael and Santa Rosa on the "SMART Pathway": multi-use trails paralleling the train tracks connected by some road segments. Parts of the route are somewhat boring views of the tracks or highway, but I still found it pleasant and low-stress:
I even fit in a few weird dirt path/park detours or shortcuts, like this trail by the Beverly Ehreth Ecological Preserve slightly outside Novato, to cut between two road segments...
I wouldn't personally add all of this SMART Pathway riding to the already-long 70-mile day above, but I've done a variant on the overall route where I stay overnight in the Santa Rosa area, making it less daunting to do a full 60-70 mile ride between Berkeley and Santa Rosa one way, on the day I'm not also riding around Sonoma county.
One benefit of riding generally parallel to the train is you could decide partway along this segment to hop on the train at an intermediate station.
+Dirt and Wetlands?
On my most recent ride, I got tired of riding along the train/highway South of Novato, and diverted out onto some dirt trails (at times rough or narrow) I saw on the map, along the Hamilton Wetlands(?), with many birds to observe.
Just look at that environment! I'd consider riding here even just as a San Rafael area ride, though this was a weekday-- I imagine it might be even slower on a weekend if more walkers are out on the trails.
+Scenic Marin / Nicasio?
Another possible variant between Petaluma and San Rafael includes Nicasio and Lucas Valley Road-- a popular Marin road riding segment. This is beautiful, swoopy, and has multiple cheese shops to stop at-- though it also has one relatively narrow road section West from Petaluma that I don't love when traffic is heavy.
Any version of this ride easily becomes an all-day adventure when you include the transit-- I don't recommend it if you're on a strict schedule, but I enjoy being able to stretch the boundaries of where I bike in the Bay Area, without having to drive bikes to the start of a ride.
For a different spin on riding to/from Sonoma, see also "3 days of bike camping, Guerneville->SF", a pleasant 45 miles/day trip with a few friends.
I enjoy mixing some gravel and dirt into my road rides, though I don't have a specific "mountain" or "gravel" bike-- just my all-around bike with 38mm tires.
A local example I've enjoyed several times in the past few years is Wildcat Creek Trail, which takes you from Wildcat Canyon Park in Richmond up to Tilden Park in the Berkeley hills. It's a good local introduction to gravel roads (and nice and wide compared to a typical multi-use trail, avoiding conflict with walkers and dogs), and I've brought along friends on road bikes and they've been able to handle it:
A short loop from Berkeley that bails out when you reach Little Farm in Tilden is something like this, about 16mi and 1100' of climbing:
Or, a nice slightly longer loop from Oakland with twice as much climbing (riding uphill to the Tilden Steam Trains, then downhill to the Claremont Hotel and Fournee bakery) is something like this, about 24mi and 2100' of climbing:
For a bit of local history, you can also visit the ruins / former site of the Belgum Sanitarium just off this route...
Last weekend I organized a ride up to Point San Pablo, about 40 miles of scenic, mostly-flat* riding, with the majority of it on paved separated bike paths (the Bay Trail, on-street bike paths in Richmond, the Richmond Greenway, and the Ohlone Greenway).
We had a good group of seven, some who I've been riding with off and on for years and some new folks. And the remarkable exchange between two people of:
"Do I know you? Your bike looks familiar." [we've all been there...]
"Wait, did we meet once on the Russian River Brewing Ride?"
"We did! Back in... 2012?!"
I've done some variant on this route several times over the years and always enjoy it-- the whole ride from the RSR bridge up to PSP Harbor is always longer and more remote than I expected, it feels liek riding out to a frontier... so I've put together a specific route from MacArthur BART and added it to the Best Rides.
Interactive / downloadable map at https://ridewithgps.com/routes/49406111 :
It's a decent ride for people who aren't used to hills, because the modest hills come about halfway into the ride, and the one absurdly steep hill is so short it's easy to walk (on this week's ride, all seven of us ultimately walked it-- there's no shame. I think I'm about 50% on riding to the top over the years).
There are all sorts of little sights to discover along the way, from the skate park by Pixar to the new-ish bike/pedestrian bridge over the train tracks in Emeryville, to the Red Baron at the bay trail, to the delightful (limited hours) Open Air Coffee in a Richmond parking lot with giant industrial spools as tables, to the tiny "fairy houses" of Point Richmond. I've marked some of these on the map above, but some you just have to keep your eyes open for.
It took us about 6.5 hours total (mapping tools would estimate 3.5-4 hours of riding time), as we stopped for lunch and a fair amount of random sightseeing, as well as to help another cyclist who was stopped by the side of the road with a chain wedged into the back of his cassette. It took a while and the ideas of about five different people, but we helped him recover and get back on the road.
Perhaps the only lowlight was an unusually intense and acrid smell of trash wafting over Cutting Boulevard from Richmond on both ends of the ride.
If you want a shorter ride and your main goal is to visit Point San Pablo, you can also start or end at Richmond or El Cerrito Del Norte BART stations, as shown on the map.
Side note: for people who were on this weekend's ride, here are links about some of the random topics we discussed or mused about:
A few years back I met a friend who lives in Berlin and we spent a week biking to Copenhagen. It turns out we had compatible cycle touring styles, and said āletās do this again some timeā¦ especially if Iām ever somewhere in Europe within a reasonable take-your-bike-on-the-train distance from Germany". Other vacation plans brought me to Slovenia, so we schemed up a week of self-supported cycling in Slovenia and a bit of Croatia, on a mix of paved and gravel roads.
Some day I hope to write up the detailed route (I want to clean up our draft map before sharing, based on a lot of changes we made on the fly), and add notes on sights, food, and stays that could be helpful to anyone else traveling here, but for now I'll share a few photos and an overall summary:
For a variety of reasons, we decided to cycle in the much less visited Eastern Slovenia (which doesnāt have the postcard-highlight sites of the Julian Alps or Ljubljana), starting in Maribor, Sloveniaās second-largest city. We'd read about a popular cycling route along the Drava river nearby that we knew we wanted to include.
I spent more hours than I want to admit digging into regional bike maps, tourist agency recommendations, and other peoplesā individual trip reports (and mail-ordered a few maps from Europe to assist with planning), and eventually stitched together anĀ interesting route where weād ride out to the Austrian border, down the Mura river to Legrad and its confluence with the Drava river, then back up the Drava into Slovenia to the famous old town of Ptuj, before turning West to a national park, castles, and our third river. This was our planned route, with a few longer-vs-shorter options depending how we felt on a given day and how tough the hils were in practice:
Some of the sources I found especially useful in this planning, or integrated partial routes from:
* Mura River route (example writeups: https://visit-prlekija.eu/en/cycling-and-hiking-trails/the-mura-cycling-route and https://www.steiermark.com/de/Steiermark/Aktiv-in-der-Natur/Rad-Bike/Murradweg )
* Drava / Drau River cycling route: (https://www.drauradweg.com/en/sections/ and https://dravabike.si/en/info/drava-cycling-routeĀ )
* Slovenia "Green Gourmet" route (we used a few days of this route in Eastern Slovenia) (https://www.slovenia-green.si/members/slovenia-green-gourmet-route/)
* Slovenia "Green Wellness" route (we copied a few stages of it from Maribor, as a very roundabout but more scenic and low-traffic way to get from Maribor to the Mura river) (https://www.slovenia-green.si/members/slovenia-green-wellness-route/)
* Some Maribor local cycle loops to consider as warmup / shakedown rides the day we arrived (https://www.visitmaribor.si/en/what-to-do/active-holiday/cycling/cycling-routes/)
* Eurovelo 13: the Iron Curtain Route (https://en.eurovelo.com/ev13)
One of my personal goals has been to do more touring on gravel and dirt roads with less traffic, and these parts of Slovenia and Croatia certainly delivered... even more than we expected, in some cases:
Touring Style:
We did this tour as a fully self-supported trip, similar to our Berlin-Copenhagen ride: we carried all our gear, did all our own planning, but stayed in hotels so we didnāt need to carry camping gear as well. Rather than bring my bike from home (which I prefer to do when possible, but was less practical since I had some non-cycling vacation just before this), I rented a bike here from Cycling United Ljubljana. I highly recommend them-- they were very helpful with tips and accommodating of some special requests (for example, I was able to pay them extra to drive the bike to Maribor for the start of our tour because I had some tight transportation logistics, and I was able to arrange to leave the bike for them to pick up in the luggage storage at my Ljubljana hotel at the end of the trip rather than lug it out to their shop on the outskirts of the city).
During the Berlin-Copenhagen ride we had only been booking hotels one night ahead, based on how far we wanted to ride the next day, the weather, and potential detours like spending a few hours at the chalk cliffs of MĆøns Klint. This gave us amazing day-to-day flexibility which I've only experienced in self-supported camping tours, but we sometimes had to compromise on hotels or ride faster/farther to make it to a hotel in a different town because all the hotels in our area were booked (especially on a holiday weekend). And researching small hotels/apartments/B&Bs that weren't listed on the big-name hotel booking sites like Booking/Hotels/AirBNB/VRBO (believe it or not, there are quite a few!) was a bit more of a pain on our phones with spotty reception while traveling vs. with a laptop at home.
For this trip, since we were traveling during the height of tourist season, we decided to book all our hotels aheadā after we came up with the overall route, we broke it down into what we thought would be management days depending on the hills, paved vs. gravel roads, and specific places that sounded interesting to spend the night (as examples: the famous old town of Ptuj, a farmstay near the Austrian border, or a specific vineyard rental house with a hot tub):
In Conclusion:
Overall, it was an amazing tour (I know I often say that, but it was). Some of the scenery was understated-agricultural-- vast fields of sunflowers and pumpkins (which made sense as we ate food made with pumpkin seed oil), chill gravel roads past farms and forests, and paths atop the walls of manmade lakes. But we also had dramatic castles on (very steep) hills, swiftly-flowing rivers, and twisty roads past shrines and monuments.
The trip also had its fair set of challenges to work through together, as expected for planning a tour somewhere neither of us had ever been. Some gravel roads were so loose or bumpy that what was intended to be a shorter day was still tiring (and hard on the wrists / knees). We were also there at the tail end of a regional heat wave with 90F+ temperatures and dark black asphalt that radiated heat upwards, and I had to refill my water multiple times a day and take stops in shady parks to recover (later in the trip, we planned late, long lunches as ways to beat the heat).
One planned bridge was just... completely gone, just concrete piers sticking out of the water. Fortunately, we'd already been suspicious of the discrepancy between online maps and a physical billboard we'd seen that morning, while small arrows on numbered signs in the ground said yet something else. Earlier, we'd diverted into a network of gravel paths that weren't on most online maps and ended up here, on the proper side of the bridge-- if we'd blindly followed google/apple maps, we would have ended up on the other side of the canal, stuck and scratching our heads:
And one night, we got into our town so late that all the markets and restaurants were closed, and we had to ride on to our rental house, a bit stressed and hungry as it was getting dark. But we found a solitary roadside ice cream stand to lift our spirits, then improvised a meal from all the snacks we had on us plus a supporting "soup" made from just water, pumpkin seed oil, and flour found in the rental house kitchen, and it all worked out.
Every trip, I learn a little bit more about how people (including myself) handle adversity, in my never-ending journey toward ideal Expedition Behavior, but that could be a whole other story.
We had just as many unplanned and positive experiences-- for example, we diverted from our preplanned route when it was hours of straight pavement between corn fields (shades of RAGBRAI...) to a route we saw signs for, not sure how bikeable it would be (one online map classified it as a hiking trail). And it was a lovely gravel road along the banks of the Mura river and through a forest, featuring dozens of informational plaques about hydrology, history, and a floating sawmill.
We also went swimming at stops along the road multiple times.. slept in an actual castle... had a three-course dinner at a farm with some of the best chicken and potatoes I've had, for 10 Euros (including wine!)... saw some great museums of traditional costumes, musical instruments, and weapons... made short across-a-river detours to Austria and Hungary because we could (including passing a former Iron Curtain border crossing that's long-abandoned and a bit creepy)... foraged roadside fruit... and saw a variety of interesting birds. Iāll look back at this trip for a long time...
Test post, to see if I can reshare a writeup I did on Strava to here (to share daily notes+photos with a few friends who don't use strava or social media, during a week of cycling I'm doing in Slovenia):
[Edit:] Unfortunately, I can only easily reshare a single summary photo from Strava, but ride notes and additional photos don't carry over.
I'll probably keep using Strava as my place to quickly share a few notes + photos with fellow riders during a tour, but intend to come back here to write up longer recaps on the most interesting rides (see for example the Taiwan writeup below).
(this is a short recap post with some photos, perhaps some day Iāll come back and write more when I have the space to fully wrap my head around what just happened)
Ever since I first visited Japan, one of my dreams has been to do a long-distance bicycle tour there, with a focus on rural areas (as well as the food, history, craftsmanship, and culture). āSome day, lifeās too busyā¦ maybe when Iām 65ā¦ā-- but after a career change, I made it happen this year. It was one of the most memorable trips of my life.
I spent five weeks cycling more or less the length of Japan, from Nagasaki to Sapporo (though with shuttle buses to skip riding around two large urban areas surrounding Tokyo and Osaka, as well as to bypass smaller regions such as an unexpected landslide in the aftermath of Tropical Storm Mawar).
I did this as a continuation of the fully-supported ride across Korea, with ~20 strangers or people Iād met on one previous bike tour (edit: and two years later, we still have an active group chatā thatās some bonding through shared experience / suffering!) A friend from home also joined me for the two-week Nagasaki -> Tokyo half of the ride.
Our routes were rural, scenic, and also quite hilly, sometimes taking mountain roads that most car traffic has abandoned in favor of newer expressways.
Iāll add to this later or write a follow-up, there are too many memorable moments, but some of my very favorite riding and landscapes were around the Aso caldera in Kyushu, the whole island of Shikoku (especially the Iya Valley), Oirase Gorge, and near Lake Tazawa.
I also got up to some off-the-mapped-route adventures that became a bit more adventurous than I'd anticipated...
(This is a placeholder writeup with a few photos, perhaps I'll come back some day and flesh it out...)
I spent a week cycling the length of Korea (~400 miles from Seoul to Busan), as a fully supported** ride with an organized tour group and about 20 strangers (though a few I'd met on a bike tour in Vietnam the previous year). By the end I felt exhilarated, challenged, stimulated, and full of great food.
Koreaās a sleeper hit when it comes to cycling infrastructure, Iām surprised I hadnāt heard more about it. We rode multiple days on paved fully separated bike paths, starting from the heart of Seoul, with infrastructure like this:
I don't think I've even seen this in Denmark or The Netherlands: a traffic circle at the intersection of four different paved cycling paths outside Seoul-- no cars here!
Clean bathrooms periodically along the bike path (especially on the first two days of riding out of Seoul):
We saw so many young Korean cyclists out riding in groups on these paths.
The riding was smooth, but the days were challenging: about 55-80 miles/day with 1500ā-5800ā in elevation gain (Korea gets quite hilly). More challenging than the raw amount of elevation gain, many of the roads were cut directly up hills at 10-16% grades for significant periods of time, rather than following more gradual contours as Iām used to at home. In all, this route was about 400 miles with 19k ft of elevation gain:
The cities we traveled through or stayed overnight in were interesting as well-- from hot springs to towns known for their pheasant, crab, or ancient tombs:
Perhaps some day I'll find time to write more about the route, the riding, and the cultural experience, but this is a start. After this, I was immediately off to Japan for a longer ride...
Footnotes:
**In this case, āfully supportedā included:
The tour company had pre-scouted a route in detail (including working with local cycling guides), booked our hotels for each night, and provided us with maps / GPX tracks.
Each evening there was a "ride briefing" in the hotel for the next day, highlighting any unusual challenges, difficult sections of navigation, and whether it was generally an easier or harder day.
A guide drove a van to the next hotel each morning carrying our bags (one duffel each), so we just needed to ride with whatever we needed for the day.
The company even set up a roadside tent ~midway along the route each day with lunch, snacks, and big jugs of water to refill our bottles, because on some of our ride days we didnāt pass through towns with open restaurants at convenient times [in practice, I would have been fine finding my own lunch or packing one, but this was certainly a nice perk and made it easier to ride long days!]
The van was also available for emergency shuttling of peopleā if you have a major bike breakdown you canāt recover from or are having health issues, you can call them. I didnāt use it on this tour, but even knowing it exists as a safety net madeĀ it less daunting to tackle a lot of challenging riding days back to back.
I enjoy the process of planning routes and tours, but it does take a lot of time, and thereās no substitute for someone scouting routes on the ground in person. Despite the tour cost, it was nice to let go for once and just show up in Korea with my bike and gear knowing there would be a plan.
We were still each free to ride at our own pace, with others or alone-- there wasnāt a guide-on-a-bike we were following each day. I enjoyed this freedom (I like to make a lot of sightseeing stops or short detours) and donāt think Iād be interested in a tour where thereās a required pace and I felt people were waiting for me. Sometimes I would ride with others, but about half the time I enjoyed just riding on my ownā¦ Iād often get an earlier start, ride casually, and get passed by other riders over the course of the day (or, as someone passed me, Iād get inspired to speed up to stay with them and then stop together for a coffee or so on).
Later Recap / Conclusions:
Looking back at a paper trip journal years later, some my highlights and learning, in a quick list in no particular order:
Taking a city bus within Seoul-- getting much more of a feeling of the city looking out the windows vs. taking the subway.
Somehow I got a reputation as a "local food finder" among other riders during the trip, with pressure to find interesting cafe stops along the road or restaurants in whatever city we spent a rest day in :)
The 7-11 "Jeonju BiBimBap" is my favorite convenience store triangle gimbap (unlike Japanese onigiri, sauce/flavored rice)
Flan at Hills & Europa in Seoul
Eating pheasant in many different ways in Suanbo
I loved the frequent theme of "this town is known for ______" (pheasant, crab, rice, etc), and it being legitimately great
Hwangnamppang (pastry filled with red bean paste) in Gyeongju
The range of pastries at Do Not Disturb cage in Gyeongju
The first few days of astounding separated bike infrastructure riding East and Southeast from Seoul...
Many coffeehouses didn't open until 10 or 11AM (more of a lunch break place?), it was somewhat difficult to find a cafe with coffee along the road early in the morning.
Going to an evening concert in a local park by old-school K-pop stars from the 90s and 2000s (from translating posters and looking at photos, I think they were So Chan Whee, Park Mi-Kyung, and two others) was a great decision, even if I was tired after a lot of riding. Note to self: always say yes to events / festivals that happen to be going on where I'm traveling.
I learned a lot about Korean hot spring / sauna etiquette and processes, won't bother to jot it all down here.
Had my first broken chain in a long time, standing up and pushing too hard on a 15% grade? It had been long enough that I didn't think to have a master link with me during the day (and had forgotten that it's not as practical to press new pins into a modern chain). I fortunately had a chain tool and was able to take out a few links of chain near the master link and re-join it, and limp along with a shorter chain and reduced set of usable gears until that evening, and was carrying a whole spare chain in my duffel bag that had been shuttled to the hotel.
I'd read about Korea's rapid growth/modernization, but I really had to experience it to begin to appreciate it. The cities felt very young. Seeing a small city out in the country that consists of a few ~30 story skyscrapers surrounded by rolling fields and gardens (no sprawl) is surreal. Major bike infrastructure built across the country by top-down direction.
I felt more culture shock and initial disorientation than I expected, given I'd traveled to many other countries across Asia in the past (and even to Korea for work, though that was a brief trip spent mostly in offices and factories, speaking English). Unsurprisingly, there's a lot to learn and pick up on, so many little details were very different from home.
Getting dinner with a small group of riders (3-5) is a better way to connect and get to know people that a big group dinner.
Had a great discussion with one of the guides about topics related to Expedition Behavior. The simple phrasing "the point of travel is it's not like home" is an interesting way to set expectations (for yourself, or for a group you're leading). I'll have to think about this more.
Packing into a Korean photobooth (optionally with costumes) is a great icebreaker with a group of strangers.
I'd heard over the years that Taiwan's East Coast is beautiful and a popular place to cycle, and that you can rent bikes at one Giant store and return them at another, making a one way rental bike tour reasonable.
I'd never quite found the excuse + motivation to plan a trip there, so had that filed away in the "some day" mental list. Then a few months ago a friend reached out saying he wanted to bike in Taiwan and would I be interested? I said yes, and before I knew it we were riding twisty roads down gorgeous Taroko gorge after gorging on breakfast dumplings...
The route we took started partway up the gorge (we got a van ride up with our bikes the previous night, and I'm glad we did-- the hills would have been manageable, but there was a lot of traffic including tour buses on narrow windy roads along a cliff, so biking up could have been unpleasant). From there, we went down to the coast, then cut inland on the remote-feeling 193 through the East Rift Valley (very lush, few cars), before climbing up the coastal mountain range on the 30, through a tunnel, and then riding along the coast to Taitung. About 270 km / 180 miles over four days.
This is the general route we took, though it's a messy file, auto-traced from a raw GPS recording, so don't count on all the cues or details being correct: https://ridewithgps.com/routes/42626006
The roads were almost universally smooth pavement, generally flat with some rolling hills, sometimes with a wide bike lane / shoulder, and other times sharing mostly-quiet country roads with scooters and cars:
We decided to make this a hybrid hike/bike trip to try to really experience this part of Taiwan-- most days we'd get up early and do a ~2 hour hike at dawn, then have a leisurely breakfast before riding for about 4-5 hours (6-7 when you include stops for lunch, museums, and beaches), getting to our destination hotel in the late afternoon. Riding only ~40-50 mildly hilly miles each day gave us the flexibility to not worry about beating sunset or having to hurry, though the hottest day still felt fairly challenging by the end.
In general the food was excellent, ranging from succulent steamed dumplings with a lot of ginger, to probably the best bao I've had in my life, to a range of great greens and vegetables. Even the onigiri at the 7-Elevens were great (my favorite flavor was "chicken rice"):
These incredible bao were ~$1 at ēŗčØčč”ę±ę²³å å, a roadside restaurant in Donghe. The left one is é øčå (the second bun from the left on their menu), and tasted like it included pork, pickled mustard greens, and ground peanuts. The right one is black sesame.
The weather was decent-- we did this ride at the beginning of April, which is about the latest in the spring I'd want to do it-- it was very humid, and the hottest day was ~85F but felt much hotter in the direct sun. We also had one day where we rode in intermittent rain all day-- but once your socks are soaked, they can't get any wetter...
This was also a new style of touring for me-- a "semi-supported, but self-guided" tour by Grasshopper Adventures. They gave us maps of recommended routes, pre-booked all our hotels, arranged the bike rentals, and arranged a driver or cab to transport our luggage from one hotel to the next each morning while we rode (as well as the van ride up Taroko gorge to start), so we didn't have to carry all our belongings on-bike, while also being available for remote support.
But there was no tour guide riding with us, so we had to do our own navigation and minor repairs-- which meant we got to take whatever side detours, hikes, or stops we wanted without holding up a larger group. I liked this compromise-- it let me jump into the trip with much less advance planning...
Looking back at my notebook, some notes-to-self for the next tour:
It was nice to ride 40-50 mile days and have down time in the afternoon to just lounge and read or wander the town
Consider a loose rain poncho instead of raincoat when riding in hot + humid weather
7-Elevens in Taiwan are amazingly well-stocked, and widespread in most areas: don't need to bring snacks from home, but...
If it's hot in a more remote area, carry 3 bottles of water (on the East Rift Valley day we found minimal places to refill before lunch, two bottles was not enough)
Check I'm buying the salty snacks (I bought a bag of unknown-flavor potato chips without translating the label, figuring it would be a fun surprise... and they turned out to be the special salt-free chips...)
Carry a handkerchief-- while I carried some backup TP/soap/sanitizer, many public restrooms had no way to dry your hands, and many of the street food stalls provided a few wispy tissue-like napkins.
Schedule your to hit major tourist sites or scenic driving routes on weekdays, for lighter traffic. I've learned this before, and thought we had that well-planned by being in Taroko Gorge mid-week. But it turned out it was the last day of a holiday (Grave Sweeping Day) so there was more traffic than usual.
Google Translate on images works remarkably well for Chinese text (signs, menus, directions) these days-- not speaking the language was a challenge, but google translate at least made most restaurant menus and roadside warning signs manageable.
Overall, it was a great experience (and good group of laid-back folks to travel with, who were also interested in making lots of sightseeing or roadside snack stand stops along the way-- travel goals compatibility is important!)
Sewed a custom frame bag in a weekend workshop at Swift Industries up in Seattle. An impractically-small one, for the partial triangle on one of my bikes. Hey, I think it looks nice, and it can hold a pump, snacks, money, keys, and a light jacket...
