I attend meetings twice a year for a performance group of which I am (perhaps obviously) a part. Though I start going crazy when I’m away from the shop, it’s fantastic to hear what other shops across the country are doing and the things they’re trying to be successful.
This time around I’m in California, near Sacramento. It takes a whole day to get here and another to get home, so I decided to take a couple of extra days and ride bikes. I poked around on the internet and starting thinking that the area east of Sacramento looked pretty good, I even did some hiking the day after and take the best spotting scope with me so I could observe the view and appreciate the nature even more. I began fixating on Auburn. I flew in last night, asked for a car big enough to haul a bike and tried to get some sleep.
My hotel has several TV channels.
Saw this in the coffee shop this morning. Looks like I’m a day late.
Since there are no good breakfast places in town, I ate here. It was great. And, truthfully, there might be a million good breakfast places, but the name drew me in.
Boom! There it is, the trusty steed. This is a Specialized Stumpjumper 29 with a Pike on the front a fancy Fox on the rear and a SRAM 1×11 drivetrain. Fun bike.
A nice guy took my picture.
I got the guy’s grandson to get in a picture, too. Super nice people.
The roar of all this water striking the rocks at the bottom was incredible. Zillions of gallons of water. Turns out that I read the map wrong (again) and went to the dam, which was a dead end. But the sound was great.
Several minutes and a bazillion feet of climbing later, the reservoir looked like this. My breathing was almost as loud as the spillage had been earlier.
It’s called Culvert Trail for a reason. You ride through this. Traveling through the inside was, as my dad used to say, as dark as the inside of a cow.
It was no less philosopher/poet than Cosmo Kramer who suggested that good manners are the glue of society.
This scene of a stump with a shrine to the tree it once was reminded me instantly of The Lorax.
