Pat and Sari's Honeymoon Bike Ride

Monday, May 26, 2008
Marina, CA to Aromas, CA
25 miles (4226 total miles)

Today was a short day. We went from our motel in Marina to the home of Seth and Jane in Aromas. Seth is a family friend of Pat's. The route took us inland into a small farm/small ranch residential area. We started off on Del Monte Blvd., riding past a Dole processing plant, which seemed strange (Seth told us later that it used to be a Del Monte plant). We then got onto a frontage road parallel to Hwy. 1 since bikes were not allowed on 1 at that point). The bike path went past several farm fields and we saw one large field of artichokes in the process of being harvested. On a rougher, more overgrown section of the path, we saw a large number of bunnies popping in and out of the brush on the sides of the path. We'd never seen so many rabbits in one place before! At the end of this path, in the town of Castroville, we went onto Rt. 156 which was now open to bikes. We soon turned off onto more local rural roads. Many of the houses along these roads were small and rustic and had horses, goats, and maybe a cow or two. Some had larger tracts and some had grander houses, but by and large it was a simple, country area. Seth had warned us that some of the roads we'd be on were hilly, and he was right. The last road before his house, in particular, had a long uphill stretch with mostly 5-6% grades, although it went up to 10-12% at one point. This didn't even begin to prepare us for Seth's driveway, though, which he had told us was 21%. We managed to get up a little bit of it, but soon got off and pushed the bike the rest of the way up.

We spent the rest of the day relaxing with Seth and Jane, and their daughter Kelsey who had just finished her senior year at high school. Tomorrow, we'll head off to San Jose, and then Wednesday to San Francisco. We only did 25 miles today in about 3 hours of bike time, but we could tell we were dragging a bit from the last 3 days with lots of climbs. We're very much looking forward to our rest period in San Fran.