Monday, November 3, 2008

The Gamble Paid Off…

Yesterday was the Giro d’Vino ride in Lodi. A bunch of us had registered for this a while back since it’s a great ride and one of the last organized rides of the year….
The only issue was that the weather guy was predicting rain this weekend and we weren’t sure if he was going to be right or wrong…..flipping a coin will usually be just as accurate as listening to those guys. We were betting he was wrong.

Saturday it poured all day. They said we received an inch and a half in a lot of areas and I was concerned Sunday would be more of the same. Still, after emailing and calling around it seemed that most of us were still game. We had a backup plan though, so if it poured we were heading for the Indian casino….

Well, Sunday turned out to be a perfect day! The weather was cool but not cold and the sun even made an appearance a few times throughout the day. The Giro d’Vino is a great ride through the wineries of Lodi, Clements, Acampo and the surrounding areas. It’s a really pretty area that I don’t think many people know about. There are a ton of nice little wineries tucked between Hwy 5 and the foothills.

Everyone that showed up met up at the registration (evidently some in our group decided not to chance it and were "at home having coffee" as we registered) and immediately split into two groups. One group was planning on doing the 50K ride with a goal of making sure they took advantage of the wine tasting on the route. The other group was doing the 100K with a goal of …well…finishing the 100K.

The route is a completely flat 100K so I took the single speed. The single speed was built up with a goal of being a nice riding, fairly lightweight, speed demon. This is probably my favorite bike and the one I prefer when we’re doing rides that don’t have ridiculous amounts of climbing.
Yesterday though, because of the weather, it was anything but lightweight. After mounting fenders, a rack and the music player,(gotta have music on these rides) it was quite a bit heavier than usual. Add to that the fact that since I was organizing our group and had a few new riders, my trunk bag was filled with rain gear, arm/leg warmers, first aid kit, 4 spare tubes, a bunch of gels and tools I’m pretty sure this thing was closer to 40 lbs that 20.

Well, the ride went really well and although the 50K and 100K routes split pretty early on, we still managed to hook up with the other group at two of the rest stops. Not sure if they were slow or we were fast, but it sure worked out nicely.

Things actually went smoothly for both groups except for the one incident where Greg, feeling like he didn’t want to pedal anymore tried to attach his bike to mine for a tow….he quickly learned the error of his way as he went into the dirt like he’d been thrown from a bull. He claims I did it on purpose ….I of course deny that… no one can prove I pointed out the Goldwing to distract him, then immediately grabbed my brakes….

All in all it was a great ride. We had several personal bests in both groups and a for a couple of the riders this was almost 4X their longest ever ride.... Afterwards the organizers fed us well and we relaxed and listened to the Vine Dawgs (
http://vinedawgs.com) while we enjoyed a pretty good bottle of wine.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I see you stopped at Woodbridge. Kathy and I are wine club members there as they have a huge selection to choose from. So much so, that if you go tasting there, you can get pretty loaded, so you need to pace yourself.

Scott V.