Week 7

Date
February 15, 2015

Distance
101 miles

Strava Link
Part 1 and Part 2

Route Map/Profile

Part 1

Part 2

Weather

Ride Report 

I took advantage of the long President's Day weekend and headed out to the coast to visit Eureka, CA and Redwood National Park. Saturday was spent exploring the park and Sunday was spent riding. The route was pretty simple- starting at the Oregon border and heading south on 101 to Eureka. I took a few detours from 101 but these were all part of the Pacific Coast Bike Route, which has very good signage on this portion of the route.

The day started off on the wrong foot. My Garmin wasn't booting up and I couldn't get it to connect to my computer or anything. The screen was stuck on "loading profiles" and restarting it wasn't fixing the problem. I suppose there's never a convenient time for your Garmin to fail, but this seemed like particularly bad timing. I didn't have time to research the problem, I stupidly left my backup GPS at home, and there's no way my phone battery was going to last the entire ride. I got frustrated, decided to run the phone app for as long as I could and started riding.

As I was riding I started to realize the absurdity of the situation. Here I was in one of the most beautiful places in the country riding my bike in nearly perfect weather and I was upset about a stupid little bike computer. Why? What was I riding for, to have fun out there or to rack up my pathetic little numbers on Strava? Perhaps my Garmin was teaching me an important lesson.

After about an hour the Garmin decided to power up, though it took a lot longer than normal to find a satellite. Once it found a satellite everything seemed to be OK. It made it through the rest of the ride and the file uploaded to Strava correctly. I'm a little worried that this might be the start of other problems with the unit, but hopefully not.

Anyway, 101 is a beautiful place to ride. I got super lucky with the weather. There was hardly any fog at all and the wind was very light. This route had a little bit of everything. There were flat sections, a few shorter climbs, some scenic riding along the coast, and a short ride through a Redwood forest.

As always, the ride was even more beautiful than the photos suggest. There are also a lot of other great routes in the area. The Tour of the Unknown Coast is worth looking into, and 299 from Eureka to Redding looks like it would be a ton of fun to ride. I had a great weekend here but could easily spend a week or more in the area.