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I’ll be honest. “Go with the flow.” That was not a profound discovery through four years of marriage. It just summed up how this 3-day Labor Day weekend went for us… There were lots of plan changes, which I call “go with the flow”. Here are just a few to illustrate the case:

Plan #1: Drive up to Tahoe area, and do road riding of our own 5-pass Death Ride (involving Kingsbury Grade, Luther Pass, and Pacific Grade, etc.) as well as the Tahoe loop. I brought it up on Friday and vetoed it myself on Friday night because it occurred to me that the traffic would be bad and there would be too many cars on the roads. Later Erik admit that he was happy that I canceled that plan because he wasn’t looking forward to the long drive after our road trip that wrapped up only one week before.

Plan #2: Charlie’s Skeggs->HMB->Skeggs ride on Saturday. There would be many familiar faces on that group ride and a ride with Charlie is always guaranteed to be fun. But it didn’t happen in the end only because I had a hard time opening my eyes when the alarm went off on Saturday morning. Then I thought I would just nap a little longer and we would try to catch up with the group on route. But when I finally woke up, it was already too late for that to happen. If we had done the ride, we would most likely have run into the group on their way back from HMB. That would have been awkward in my mind. So, that plan was killed. Good thing though because under my pressure, Erik examined his mountain bike (first time after our road trip) after we got up and found that his rear brake rotor was warped so bad that it was constantly rubbing. It would have been bad if we had gotten on the big ride. A swap of the rotor with my old bike fixed the problem. Now we are ready to ride!

We ended up going for a 56 mile road ride from the house in the afternoon (W. Alpine up, Page Mill down, Canada to Crestview, Canada back to OLH, and home). I had mentioned to Erik Crestview Drive, a steep climb that I had incorporated sometimes on my commute. On this ride, I got to show him the climb and what I had said before started to make sense to him. He was glad to experience it.

After the ride, I took him to a Korean restaurant in San Mateo I had discovered and liked. The food was good, but on a busy Saturday evening, located right next to an Asian supermarket, the restaurant was full of screaming kids — not really a good venue for an anniversary dinner.

To make up for the sub-par dining experience on Saturday, we went to Moss Beach Distillery for their Sunday Brunch. Our table was right by a window above a cliff over-looking the beach down below. After the nice brunch, we went down to the beach and Erik did some beach combing like a kid in the wonderland.

Plan #3: Now that Erik’s bike had been fixed, we were going to do the Skeggs->HMB->Skeggs ride on own our on Monday, the Labor Day. But again, despite having gone to bed fairly early, I had a hard time waking up again. (Man! The work week after our trip really played its toll on me!) So, we “went with flow” and slept in. Also not wanting to deal with rangers with radar guns for speed control on the trails, we elected to pay Soquel Demo a visit. It turned out to be a very fun ride — we hit every main trail there. I’m posting the route below just because I liked the shape.

GPS track also available on MTBGuru and Plus3Network.

P.S. Last night, I proclaimed to Erik before he drifted into sleep that we had been married for four years. Here is his response, “Wow, four years! I didn’t even know that was possible!… Oh, I didn’t mean it in THAT way…” I chuckled and fell asleep. From what I gathered, he lay awake for quite a while after that. Maybe he had come up with some profound discovery in those awaken hours?

• Post ID: 1250
• Categories: Family , Mountain Biking
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