Lee and I went on a really nice ride today, looping along the uppermost part of the East Bay area along the Carquinez Strait.

I was doing some recon for a 200K permanent brevet route I'm putting together (here's my most recent version of the proposed permanent route), and today's ride was over the one part of the route I've never ridden.

We started out at the Orinda BART station and followed Camino Pablo, San Pablo Dam Rd, Castro Ranch Rd, Alhambra Valley/Pinole Valley Rd, San Pablo Ave to Pamona Ave to Crockett.


Here's the view of the Carquinez Bridge from the Vista Point, before we descended into Crockett.



Pokey and Waldo were patiently waiting for us




We had a nice lunch at the Valona Deli in beautiful downtown Crockett - they make excellent sandwiches there. (Since it's open all day, it's probably going to be one of the controls on my permanent because it's at the extreme north end of the route.)

Then we continued on along the Carquinez Scenic Drive which runs along the Carquinez Strait. About 25 years ago a portion of this road was washed out and has never been repaired, so it's closed off to cars for a couple of miles. It's now part of the Carquinez Strait Shoreline Park and there are convenient staging areas on either side of the closed off section. As the name implies, the views of the bay from this road are lovely. The closed off part of the road was a bit rough but not too bad, though we had to go gingerly across the washed out section which was muddy.

The road surface was pretty good for the most part.


Except the washed out part was muddy - glad we had our fenders after that!



We then meandered thru Martinez and on to Alhambra Ave then Pleasant Hill Rd. By then Lee was starting to feel really funky, coughing and wheezing up a storm. My poor honey has lungs of Saran Wrap. So instead of heading to the Walnut Creek BART station as we had originally planned, we went to the Pleasant Hill BART instead, and then rode it back to Orinda.

It was about 38 miles and around 1800 ft of climbing. There were some long grades but nothing particularly steep.

A really nice ride, at least from my perspective. Lee felt fine again once he was out of the cold.