Now that’s more like it! Alas, no other Spokers joined Roger H and me to schlep 80 miles into the Valley to do this community fundraiser last Saturday. The ride was fantastic: perfect weather (73 degrees!) with sunny skies, a well-supported yet inexpensive ride, and a near-Goldilocks size ride of about 300 participants altogether (but only about 130 on the metric century).

Our ominously dry winter continued but in exchange we’ve been given excellent riding weather. Unlike the last two Valley centuries, the Velo Love Ride and the Almond Blossom, which started in the low 40s, this one opened at 51 degrees, a sign that the day was going to turn out just right. By midday we were basking in glorious sunshine, almost no wind, and short-sleeves and shorts weather. It’s downright amazing that the Community Center for the Blind and Visually Handicapped could put on a century like this for a mere $45. It has all the trappings of a big event: stocked rest stops, sag support, ham radio, mid-ride lunch, post-ride meal, and course photographers! How are these guys making any money? It’s probably due to the immense community support the non-profit organization has: a great volunteer corps, enthusiasm, and lots of donations.

Unlike the Velo Love Ride and the Almond Blossom the Pedaling Paths has rolling terrain with short hills because it goes over to the eastern edge of the Valley. The first part is mostly flat with just a few gentle rolls, but at the midway things get decidedly more interesting with a long series of rollers some pretty short and some just long enough that you can’t sprint up them. The metric is a large counterclockwise loop and like the Almond Blossom it doesn’t go ‘anywhere’, ie. you don’t pass through any towns or suburbs—you’re in rural land the entire time. And that’s a good thing because the ag zone around Linden, the start town, is diverse and pretty. The northern end is mainly large walnut groves and vineyards; as you head south you’re greeted with miles and miles of almond blossoms, which are hitting their peak. There is rangeland and you pass by grazing cattle and sheep and a couple of stockyards. With the gently rolling terrain you have vistas of the area around you unlike the Almond Blossom, which is so flat that you’re submerged in trees for a great portion and unable to see much around you other than the occasional farm building or tower. At this time of year the green is high (despite the lack of rain) and the hills are verdant and colorful.

But back to the beginning. The start is about ten miles east of Stockton in the small town of Linden. Stockton is the ‘big city’ but it doesn’t take long before you’re nowhere near urbanity and it’s all farms. The start was busy for such a small event and registration was old-school: get in line to check in, turn in your waiver, and get your wrist band. Fortunately the line for the two portapotties was short. But that wouldn’t be true the rest of the day! This century is big enough that you see other cyclists almost the entire day but the road doesn’t look carpeted with spandex as it does in the Marin. The deal with these Valley centuries is to go fast on the flat and find a good paceline so you can go even faster. Oh, and latch onto a tandem if you can. But Roger and I weren’t in the mood to go fast (as if we could anyway). At least I thought that was the case until a tandem passed us with a clutch of remoras and Roger started to go faster. We didn’t try to glom onto the tandem but we were going a bit more quickly than I had expected (and wanted). Unlike the Almond Blossom the roads near Linden—still ag roads—are in much better shape, so it’s pleasant to whiz by the orchards rather than go bumpety-bump and dodging potholes and cracks. After swinging through a bunch of orthogonal turns and a lot of different orchards you head south for a long stretch and you get to see cyclists in front and behind you as you roll up and down the short swales. We got passed a few times but we were passing a lot more.

In a trice we were at the first rest stop at a fire station on Highway 4. In the engine bay. I was wondering what they’d do if they got a call with all those cyclists munching in their way. The rest stop food was better than perfunctory: pbj sandwiches, oranges, cookies, coffee!, energy bars. The line for the portapotties was long so we took off. This section south of Highway 4 is also beautiful and without many cars. We stopped for a natural break and promptly got passed by about 30 cyclists. The road eventually turns north into the hills and suddenly those cyclists who passed us were being flung out the back one by one. Roger has a poker face but I can tell that he doesn’t like to get passed and he enjoys catching cyclists. He didn’t go any faster (if it wasn’t clear by now: I was hanging on to his wheel for most of the day) but he just didn’t slow down on the hills. Which meant I was seeing alarmingly high heart rates. There were a couple of cyclists who were trying to catch us but every time we went uphill their imminence dwindled; conversely they slowly would close on us on the flat and downhill sections since we weren’t pushing it there.

Lunch couldn’t have come fast enough. I was just about wasted and very hungry. Lunch is always held at the Milton cemetery. Milton is the name on the map but other than a few farm houses I’m not sure there is a real town there anymore. Lunch was better: bags of potato chips (salt!), and ham & cheese sandwiches along with the other stuff. And chilled Gatorade. We didn’t stay long—just enough to throw down some grub. And the line for the two portapotties was long. Again.

We took off and it was clear I was wasted. I usually feel much better after lunch but today I was lagging. And after lunch the hills got a little steeper (or maybe it just felt that way.) By now everyone was spread out so we weren’t seeing too many other riders. Roger slowed down for my sake and we basically did the section to the third rest stop at a reasonable pace.

At the third rest stop we had some trail mix and I suddenly felt better. Ah, salt and sugar! So the last nine miles were done faster. Boom, we were back at the start. The dining room was pretty full; was it that we started late or was it just folks doing the shorter ride? The kids from the local community college were dishing up the food: salad, bread, pasta in a pesto cream sauce, and grilled chicken. Not bad at all. On the tables were bowls of Lindor chocolates that had been donated. Less than two hours later we were safely back home. Total time from leaving the house to returning was nine hours with about five of that actual riding time.

Who did this ride? It was a much bigger crowd than the Almond Blossom. I saw jerseys from the Stockton Bicycle Club, Sacramento Bike Hikers, Davis, PenVelo, Fremont Freewheelers, and some other clubs I didn’t recognize. It was the ‘usual’ crowd, ie. recreational cyclists in spandex, with a few racers slumming. What was quite noticeable was the large number of women on this ride. The age was also quite varied, ie. except for Millennials every other age cohort seemed to be represented.

The food culture was interesting. There was absolutely no effort made to cater to anyone with ‘special’ diets. If you wanted gluten-free, dairy-free, vegetarian, vegan, peanut-free, no HFCS, organic whatever, whole grain this-and-that–well, you were shit out of luck. You better like to eat cheese, meat, peanut butter, sugar, and cream. I actually found it to be refreshing: a call back to a more innocent era. Especially for a small fundraiser like Pedaling Paths, you just can’t expect it to cover all the bases. Living in the Bay Area we’ve come to expect that diet diversity is a given. Not in the Valley!

We will, no doubt, come back to ride it again. But I do hope they have more portapotties the next time.

Most of you are probably unaware of a quiet, unobtrusive ride held in Ripon, CA every winter, the Almond Blossom Century. Over the years I’ve noticed this ride but I had never ventured out to the San Joaquin Valley to investigate because of scheduling conflicts, the weather, or injury. When I was looking up centuries in December there didn’t seem to be a 2020 edition and I thought it was just another unknown community bike ride that bit the dust without a sob or a tear. About two weeks ago I stumbled across the announcement for it scheduled to run on February 16 and I thought, “How can they organize a century ride in just weeks without hardly any publicity??”

This annual ride is a fundraiser for Music First, a non-profit in the San Joaquin Valley that provides music and music education. It seems to be a one-man operation and the money raised seems to go to pay for him and his various musical groups to play music in a variety of venues in the valley. That made me suspicious but also earned my admiration: here’s a guy who wants to earn a living making music and if no one will pay him, then he’ll do it himself! The 2020 metric century had an entrance fee of a mere $25, a pittance. That’s an unheard of low cost and would have been cheap even in the 1980s.

Well, Roger and I just had to check this ride out especially slnce Ripon is only about 70 miles from our home, certainly no farther than driving down to Gilroy to do the Tierra Bella and certainly less than going to Gridley for the Velo Love Ride. We lucked out this year with very pleasant sunny weather and mostly clear skies although we did start the ride at 41 F, requiring that we be bundled up. But the forecast high was 69!

The drive out I-580 to State 99 and down to Ripon was clear sailing on an early Sunday morning—it took a little over an hour. Ripon is one of those farm towns in the SJ Valley that you roll through on your way to Yosemite, LA, or—god forbid—Fresno. We’d never been there before and had no idea what it would be like. We pulled into the Ripon Veterans Hall parking lot and were greeted by…not much. There were maybe twenty cars parked in front and roughly that number of folks in cycling kit malingering about. Well, at least there was a ride—I had my doubts—and as one who appreciates the smaller things in life including modest centuries this certainly fit the bill. The bulk of the jerseys were San Joaquin County Cycling Club proving that the locals will turn out for their very own century ride. And contrary to any misconceptions about hick cyclists, there we were amongst Pinarellos, a very pretty and no doubt expensive Calfee tandem, Parlee carbon wonderbikes, and the usual carbon Treks and Specializeds. Nary a Sears bike in sight.

We were doing the metric century but Music First also offers a 40- and a 20-mile ride. Perhaps the shorter rides get a better turnout. Off we went in the crisp winter morning and we felt like real explorers—we saw only a few other cyclists out and spent the bulk of the day riding by ourselves with no other cyclists in sight. Riding in the heart of the San Joaquin Valley means one thing: dead flat roads laid out in rectangular grid fashion. You either appreciate being able to see straight ahead for miles or you bemoan the relatively unchanging scenery. Off to the west you can catch a glimpse of the Contra Costa hills that separate the Valley from Livermore. Other than that you’re stuck looking at various kinds of agriculture, tall farm buildings, and the occasional cell tower. The route was a gigantic clockwise loop that took you nowhere in particular except various farm intersections. The good news was that the almond trees, of which there were an immense number—now I know where all that almond milk comes from—were coming into bloom with their pale pink blossoms. The timing of the ride was certainly spot on this year.

As with the DSSF Velo Love Ride a week ago there was very little automobile traffic out on the ag roads—it mostly had to be local traffic since there was nothing else out there, not even towns. Ripon was the “big city”. However the straight roads encouraged some of the locals to treat them like drag strips—I mean, who the hell are you expecting to “run into” out there anyway? But for the most part we felt pretty safe. On the other hand if you’ve ridden on ag roads in California, you know that they are often minimally maintained. Asphalt is expensive these days and county road budgets don’t have the largesse to keep all the roads in pristine shape. So there was a lot of rough road to crawl over. If you ride out there you’ll enjoy it more with big floaty tires rather than the 23 or even 25mm anorectic rubber you’re used to sporting at home,

Riding in the SJ Valley is different than riding coastside even though both are agricultural. The latter is rolling and even sometimes quite hilly whereas the Valley is pancake flat. You’re not going to find many orchards coastside and it’s mostly cool climate vegetables and fruits such as strawberries, artichokes, and various kinds of brassica. But in the Valley you have a real diversity of plant foods. Near Ripon the primary trees are almonds but just to the west near Patterson are hugs plantations of apricots. We passed grapes, swiss chard, and kohlrabi. There were also large cattle feed lots and either rangeland or fallow fields. When you’re riding in the orchards you’re pretty much submerged in trees and can’t see much else. It’s only when you get out of orchard zones that you can see that there actually are other things being grown.

The metric had three rest stops at roughly 18 mile intervals. The food at the rest stops was exactly the same—smokehouse almonds (duh!), Famous Amos cookies, slices of local oranges, and bottled water—that’s it, and the stops had only one volunteer. Given how small and inexpensive this event is we shouldn’t have been surprised. The rest stops were the only times we actually interacted with any other cyclists, like one or two. But the lack of more substantial food was unfortunate and it led to us blowing off the third rest stop, which also saved us about four miles of repetitive riding. We got back to Ripon around 1 pm and the parking lot was about 2/3’s vacant now. There was no end-of-ride meal nor a check-in: sort of a blah way to end the ride.

Overall it was interesting to ride in the Ripon area but more from a sociological than a cycling point of view. Would we do it again? Unlikely without a substantial change in the ethos of the ride. It’s meant to be a dirt-cheap ride run on a shoestring because it’s a fundraiser. But some of the fun factor got dropped as well. It wouldn’t hurt this event to have slightly better rest stop snacks and a meal at the end, not so much because we’re greedy eaters but because I think participants do want to be slightly coddled and an end-of-ride meal would be a good way for cyclists to hang out a bit before taking off. There was something disappointing and deflating about arriving at the Veterans Hall and seeing no one in sight and just a few pastries thrown on a table with soft drinks. Not even the organizers were anywhere in sight. It’s like hosting a party and then going to bed early while everyone else is raving on. Given that Music First is the beneficiary, it would have been great to have some musicians serenading the cyclists as they came in. But for $25 what do you expect?