Day 7 June 5

66 miles today, total to date 370miles

 

Well today was interesting.  Because of the weather forecast with more snow for the mountains today and with roads closed in Yosemite and the two passes to the north of Yosemite, we elected to go west and north to Bakersfield and to stay in the San Joachim Valley for a while.   The ride turned out to be very interesting and in some ways very frustrating.  We climbed about 750-800 feet out of Tehachapi and we were following a Google Maps bike route that sent us down a county road. For the first 15 miles things were fine and there was lots of traffic coming toward us so we felt this would work well.  As we descended into a valley and were cruising along near Stallion Acres, we noted a sign that said pavement ends in 5 miles.  Sure enough, after a very steep descent of 500-600 feet the road turns to dirt.  We continued on and it turned out that the entire descent over 14+ miles was on a dirt road with beautiful scenery but very tiring as we had to ride the brakes the whole time and go about 5 miles per hour because of soft spots, sharp turns and occasional rocks and debris in the road.  The first pavement we found was in the valley about 15 miles south and 10 miles east of Bakersfield.  We had some tail wind and much of the north bound riding was fun but we were tired and had already been on the bikes for more than 6 hours by then.  

 

For those of you who have committed to donating to the Foundation for PMR based on our ride, since Mary and I are both 65, we are hoping that any day we go more than 65 miles that the rate per mile would double for that day.  Just a thought. 

 

If you haven’t checked out the Foundation, go to WWW.FoundationforPMR.org. 

 

We are going to do some serious thinking later tonight to plot our next few days but looks like we will basically go north from Here toward Proctor and then Three Rivers and perhaps Squaw Valley.  We are off our route however so we have to plot courses our selves and hope to avoid both heavy traffic and also the long dirt roads we saw today.