ride railroaded
The plan sounded easy enough. Drive to Elk Grove then ride south along the river on the levee roads, grab lunch in the old historical Chinese community of Locke, cross one of the drawbridges and then ride back to Elk Grove on the other side of the river. Forty nine miles of completely flat roads–it sounded easy enough.
I was really looking forward to this ride because I was going to be riding with some guys from high school that I haven’t seen in a while. Plus I’ve ridden the levee roads before, and it’s always been a nice ride.
When I loaded my bike I noticed that my car was still covered in frost and ice. It was gonna be a cold ride…
While loading bikes on my car, I dropped my cellphone, shattering the screen. It’s survived tons of drops, even a bike crash, so it’s weird that it chose today of all days to finally shatter. At the time I didn’t think of it, but actually that was kind of an ominous sign…
Out of all the people that I regularly ride with in the Davis/Sac area, only Jiro was able to make it. So we drove from Davis to Elk Grove and met with my high school friends at a high school parking lot.
From there we headed out towards the river. We didn’t even make it out of town before our ride was ended by these train tracks. Several guys crashed trying to get across the tracks, and unfortunately Terrence ended up with a completely bent front rim.
So what was supposed to be a 49 mile bike ride ended at about mile 1. Terrence walked back with his bike, and we met back at the school. I had an extra front wheel at home, so we decided to swap out his wheel and ride to Winters instead.
We swapped out the wheel and started riding, but it started raining before we even got out of town. We decided to call it quits, since it was pretty cold, riding through rain on a cold day would’ve been miserable.
So in the end our ride got railroaded not just by the railroad tracks, but by the rain as well. Oh well, it was a fun little excursion and it was good seeing people that I haven’t seen in a while.
I just realized, that my last few rides on levee roads have all had some sort of mishap. I crashed on my last ride on this particular road, and I had almost a disastrous mishap on the levees North of Davis on a bike camping trip to Colusa. So maybe I should just stop biking on levee roads…
