Last ride of 2006

This morning some friends and I rode over the hills to San Gregorio, where we stopped at the General Store for some homemade snacks to refuel ourselves for the ride back. The pace of life is very laid back in this quaint, out-of-the-way town off Highway 1. Unless a car happens to be passing by (we saw two or three), nothing there betrays which of the past five or six decades we're in. I highly recommend spending an afternoon there. The General Store has live music usually involving a banjo or a guitar and one or more fellows with beards and plaid shirts. And my fingers and toes were won over by the old stand-alone fireplace.

So this is the first time I've used my cycling GPS unit on a ride all the way to the coast. For the curious, it's an Edge 305, and it was a generous gift from dad. Here's the data it gathered, sliced and diced into interesting graphs and figures courtesy of motionbased.com. Look at that elevation map. Wow. Note the links on the left that lead to more detailed data. And here's a full-page map of the route. It's fun to view in Google Earth, with 3D terrain.

I didn't take my camera along today, but here's a photo of some friends and I at the top of West Alpine, from two weeks ago.