Last Saturday 10 fun gals showed up for one of Team Fun’s favorite (and very local) rides; five went with Julie down the coast through Del Mar to take the SR56 bike path east for some fast rollers up and down Camino del Sur and San Dieguito Rd before coming back to town via beautiful Rancho Santa Fe (if you haven’t visited in a while, you should). The leaves are changing and turning that woodsy town into a Monet painting or something similarly wonderful. The other five followed me (Michell) around Encinitas’ coastal hills on a slightly modified short version of Jill’s BDay ride route. The two Marianne’s, Beth Ann and Nanda were up to all the rather un-C-group-like up-slopes (the Quail Hollow climb being the gnarliest) and bravely turned with me into a few ‘dead end’ streets that thankfully are not quite dead ends when you are on a bicycle. We avoided the  a bit too-busy-for-comfort Birmingham Dr downhill and San Elijo Dr by turning off Nardo/MacKinnon Rd at Burkshire instead and followed it to Vivaldi, whose cul-de-sac end offers a beautiful little paved passage from the Renaissance to the Baroque periods… Okay, okay, so I’m being a bit melodramatic, but we really were sort of musically progressing as we escaped from Vivaldi St onto Bach St, which then deposited us onto Rubinstein Ave (I suppose for either Anton or Nikolai… but not Artur!) and then Melba… who, I’m afraid, was not a composer (but she could really sing, so that doesn’t really matter). We made our way through the low-traffic streets of Encinitas and after a while found ourselves traveling north on Orpheus. I don’t know how many musical ages we had skipped backward to catch him, but he was being quiet and allowed us to get back to the Coast Hwy without trailing a bunch of dancing trees and rocks off our backs. The lasses did so well as the ride was the hardest one so far for some. We got back to the shop before lunch hours and spent some quality time socializing over Coca Cola Classics and other goodies at It’s A Grind before splitting for home.

Beautiful Rice Canyon Rd in Rainbow.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! And if you find yourselves free next Saturday (Nov 29th) and in need of burning off some of the turkey and stuffing and pies, etc, come out and join us for a really gorgeous Inland North County ride! We are taking off from the Welk Resort north of Escondido at 8 am for a climb up Circle R to Lilac, down twisty Couser Canyon Rd and up almost equally twisty Rice Canyon Rd into Rainbow, then a swerve west to visit Fallbrook before taking Camino Del Rey back to Old 395. It’s going to be FUN!!!