Dear Floyd,
I have been a bike racer for the past several years and have always admired you from afar. In the back of my mind, I have always wanted to come visit your hometown, ride the routes which built your power, and get a sense of the sites you saw at the top of each climb. Luckily, my fiance, Mike, has similar desires. So, after finishing the San Dimas stage race, we packed up the car and headed south to spend a few days riding in Temecula.
This morning was very exciting...we found your 'favorite' route (according to bicycling.com), packed our pockets with bars, and headed out for a 75 mile loop up 6000ft. Mt Palomar. Never, in my many years of biking, have I choked fumes, been sworn at, or sideswiped as many times as I was today. How can you ride here?? It's a land of housing complexes, strip malls, and roads in beautiful places which have 1 lane, 60 mile speed limits, and no shoulders. 17.5 miles into the route, we turned around and headed home as we'd had one too many crazy-ass driver piss us off. I now see why you are driven to drink whiskey after a hard ride. I could have used a shot myself earlier this morning. The ultimate highlight was watching a cop pull 2 guys over. As he was handcuffing them, he found a gun. We overhead him asking what it was for. "Shooting squirrels," was the man's reply. Hah!
We ended up doing our intervals on an empty hill within a new housing development and rode home through the strip malls to avoid the shoulder-less roads. Lovely. If you'd like open roads where a post-ride drink entail a glass of wine on our deck overlooking the San Francisco Bay, you have an open invitation to come ride with us in Berkeley. Our days of riding in San Diego county have come to an end.
Fondly,
Ali
4 comments:
Wow, that is a bummer. I went up Palomare back in 2002 and it was much like Diablo with virtually no traffic. I started in the middle of nowhere and ended at the observatory.
I guess I won't ever be going back.
Next time skip Palomare and go hit the Fiesta Island Circuit Hammerfest on Thursday evenings.
That sounds like a place to avoid. Too bad if it used to be a nice place; another resource lost to badly designed/implemented development.
Now I want to go find a nice place and take a long ride.
sorry to hear the ride was a let-down. I guess it was worth trying just to cross it off the list of things you need to try :)
That picture looks tranquil.
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