Coastin’ along

The Wife is taking a one week break between jobs, serendipitously timed with a planned trip to the San Luis Obispo area this weekend to visit her parents and to ride in an organized ride. I am taking some time off to spend with her and we have had a protracted discussion about what to do during the week. We now have a plan.

For some time we have been wanting to do the route of the Big Sur ride, either as the event or as a self-supported tour. There was discussion of doing that loop this week but groans at the thought of doing two 80-95 mile days, with camping gear, back to back then doing a metric century within a day or two afterwards. The Wife does want some rest this week, after all. So we compromised, especially since the agreed upon route takes us towards her parents. We will travel down the coast, starting tomorrow, driving a bit, then riding a loop, then continuing on to the next destination. The one solid commitment for a ride is to cycle from Limekiln State Park up Nacimiento-Ferguson Road to Mission Road, and visit Mission San Antonio de Padua, perhaps the most remote of the California Missions. We are hoping for great weather, similar to what we enjoyed four years ago when we did a tour of the California coast and had awesome views like this moonrise near Lucia.

Saturday we will ride in the Lighthouse Century out of San Luis Obispo, travelling back north along the coast. We had planned to do the 100 mile ride, but The Wife’s mother would like to try doing her first metric century and “has always dreamed” of doing such a ride with her daughter.  So we will take it easy and do one of the metric routes, instead.   That is a bit of good and a bit of bad. Good in that if normal weather patterns prevail we will not have to do that push into headwinds to Piedras Blancas, bad in that we will not get that long push back southward after the turnaround. Hope to have some photos of all this fun next week after we return.