Bicycling is almost always fun for me, but I get tired of rolling over the same old routes. It's fun to visit someplace new where every bike ride is a new adventure.
I spent much of the past week in Sacramento for some high school functions with my son, and I made the best of my free time with some decent bike rides.
I googled “bike rental Sacramento” before I left, so I already had a map of area bike rental shops when I got there. Although the weather was supposed to be “Seattle-like,” my days for rides were sunny. Lucky me.
Three rides
In two bike rides, I bicycled the entire length of the Jedediah Smith Memorial Trail (above), a bike-hike trail that runs between Discovery Park in Sacramento and Folsom Lake some 32 miles away.
The Saturday ride took me west to the state capital, where I stumbled into Old Town Sacramento. It's a touristy spot with a lot of railroad history that's featured in a very cool Railroad Museum. Reaching a destination like this on a bike adds extra zest to the visit.
On Monday I rode the other direction to old town Folsom, eventually climbing the only hill on the route to Folsom Lake behind Folsom Dam.
Bike friendly
Both Folsom (above) and Sacramento are listed among the Bicycle Friendly communities. But the friendliest of all is platinum-level Davis, which I visited on Wednesday.
Cars are mostly banned on the campus of UC-Davis, but it's more than just students riding bikes to classes here. Bikes are parked all along the city streets as well.
Once again I located a shop that rents bikes. Like a pilgrim visiting a sacred shrine, I bicycled around town and the college, basking in the utter bicycleness of everything.
Tale of the tape
The visit to Sacramento allowed me to put down a very pleasureable 84 miles there. Added to my earlier rides at home, I logged 312 miles for the month of January over 18 rides.
That's the most I've ever ridden in the month of January since I started keeping stats 17 years ago. It doesn't quite hit the average 333 miles per month I need to attain to reach a goal of 4,000 for 2008, but it's better than the 206 miles I rode last January and the abysmal 58 I logged in 2002.
It certainly helped to end the month in a sunny location. With snow and rain here, I doubt that I could would have ridden that many miles.
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