Bicycle Road Trip

I’m officially convinced that i've the best work. Ever.

The 320 mile travel took five times to achieve. Five marvelous times. We tackled the Northern Ca shore as an element of Climate Ride – an incredible organization and event. Weather Ride enables riders to direct their particular fundraising money into environmental non-profit of the choice, and it is the greatest ecological charitable bicycle trip in the country. It has in addition already been dubbed a “green seminar on rims” since so many participants tend to be leaders into the environmental action. I’d ridden Climate Ride before – a year ago indeed – but this year’s temperate autumn sunlight thought some sort of from the rainy, blustery circumstances we experienced on Climate Ride 2011 (aka Storm Ride 2011).

We started along the Eel River….

We road through the iconic Mendocino Coast….

Therefore we finished during the San Francisco Civic Center!

This is really my 3rd time doing this route, as well as the 3rd time I’ve ridden this element of the coast with respect to the surroundings. The first time we rode from Fortuna to san francisco bay area had been with my good friend Jess McNally after graduating from university. Jess and I also biked from Portland, Oregon to Santa Cruz, Ca, while touring deliberate communities working towards sustainability goals. And unlike my two trips with Climate Ride, we carried all of our own camping gear on our bicycles! Naturally, it made Climate Ride, featuring its sag wagons and catered meals, feel QUITE luxurious!

After my travel with Jess, I happened to be addicted to cycling – not merely as a kind of transportation (that is how exactly we viewed our bicycles on our travel), but as a way to travel which respectful, responsible, and adventurous. Whenever you travel by bike, you meet people and encounter your surroundings in a fashion that is ultimately way more enjoyable than once you travel by car. While vehicles definitely consistently have a role in our society (I’m very grateful to possess usage of my boyfriend’s car at a moment’s notice), there’s nothing can beat connecting together with your surroundings and a residential area from the seat of your bicycle.

The seaside rollers (biker speak for rolling “hills”), cool sea piece of cake, regular blackberry selecting prevents (means a lot better than energy bars), and singer villages so small you’d neglect all of them if you blinked, are only various samples of the delicate joys of bicycle touring – joys that you’re very nearly entirely blind to whenever you’re in a motor vehicle. Sure, you can pull your car at a turnout for 2 blackberries, but i could guarantee they don’t taste almost as sweet as they do after a 2, 500 base mountain climb.

Of course, i favor to pay my holidays motor-free.

In this nature, this past Summer my boyfriend and I completed our first ever before tropical cycle tour! A ten time, leisurely bike trip across the Big Island of Hawaii.

I’d been to Hawaii repeatedly before, and I’d done multi-day bicycle trips aswell. But this is the 1st time I biked through a lava area, a wilderness, a rainforest, volcanic steam ports plus one of the nation’s biggest cattle ranches all-in the same week. The number of smells – from hot rainfall striking asphalt to flowers to sulfur to manure – ended up being an olfactory adventure in its own right.

Climate Ride is mainly about promoting bikes as a form of transportation, but In addition desire to emphasize the worthiness of bicycles as an automobile for pure satisfaction. Bicycles just take transport, and work out it not only healthier and green, and exciting, enriching, and exploratory. There’s nothing beats understanding that you’ve pedaled every inches of roadway between two destinations. By the time you are through with your journey, you've got found on aspects of culture, neighborhood, and infrastructure which are imperceptible when you’re traveling by vehicle.

Many thanks, Climate Ride staff, for offering Team NRDC because of the opportunity to go through the pure satisfaction of pedaling through some of the most breathtaking nation in the field for just one more 12 months! Just what a lucky woman I am, having invested nearly 15 days come july 1st and fall doing just rotating my wheels.