Bike East Bay's Berkeley Hills ride

Deb Janes of Bike East Bay kept everyone together . No one got lost or died.

Bike East Bay (formerly known as East Bay Bike Coalition, which I love as it always took me several tries to spell "Coalition.") hosted a ride for people planning on participating in the Climate Ride but were kind enough to invite the rest of the world as well. Tricia and I joined them. At 44 miles with 4400 feet of climbing it goes in the books as a climbing ride.

Tricia on Pig Farm Hill

I'm used to a ride that starts at 9:00 pretty much leaving at 8:59. This one took about 40 minutes to get organized, what with route explanations, late arrivals, and Bike East Bay and Climate Ride explanations. But eventually we hit the road, and almost immediately turned up the roughest road I've been on in ages. Paris-Roubaix is today, so I didn't dare even note the road surface out loud, but it was impressively bad. Apparently it's on schedule to be repaved this year. That was the last bit of sketchy road all day.

And  what a beautiful day it was! And how often can you meet a group of strangers and go off on a delightful adventure where everyone is so nice? No one got dropped, and there were frequent regroups. Even the weather cooperated. It was pleasingly warm but never got hot.  I was happy to see the sections of road I put some effort into resulted in a few personal bests. I made my best time up Pig Farm, a hill I regularly try to hammer as hard as I can. I hope this predicts some successful cycling on my upcoming rides.

We parked in Orinda and took BART to Rockridge to start.