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Bay Area Roads: Riding Alphabetically

By Bo Crane

With lots of time these days, I’ve listed my favorite Greater Bay Area roads for each alphabet letter, with a preferential nod to those close to my home in Palo Alto. This list begins with A and ends M. Next month’s highlights are roads beginning with N through Z. Here’s the list:

A: Arastradero, Altamont Pass, Alhambra Valley, Atlas Peak — four special roads but I’m going with Alpine Road in San Mateo County. It’s part of the famed Loop and westerly connects grassland ridge above and the redwood forest below. Too bad the dirt path between the two paved sections is not very feasible for a road bike (and a hard challenge for mountain bikers).

B: Big Basin Way (Highway 9) is a long descent to Boulder Creek, where it intersects Bear Creek Rd., another excellent B choice.

Spoilers alert! Movies are better with Bikes

By Shawn Reynolds

With the Covid virus spoiling 2020, I have been forced to watch a lot of movies; some great and some not. For example, one movie I watched was Citizen Kane. At the end of the film, we learned that “Rosebud” was the sled he used as a boy. All I could say after the movie was, “All that for a sled?” One minor change would have improved Kane a great deal. Change sled to bicycle. The ending would make much more sense, and elevate this movie from meh to good.

What makes a good movie? After watching many, many movies and eating lots and lots of ice cream, I have begun to see a pattern. All truly good movies have bicycles. Take Breaking Away, E.T., and Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. All three are great movies and all three have bicycles in them. This may be the biggest revolution in the theater arts since they decided to have women play female roles in plays.

In Bike Shorts: Keep on Keeping on

In mid-August, Adventure Cycling Association announced the designations of the first U.S. Bicycle Routes in Wisconsin and California, adding over 500 miles of routes to its system of bike routes around the country. Of interest to bike tourists, USBR 50 connects Lake Tahoe and the existing USBR 50 in Nevada to the San Francisco Bay Area.

Beginning in South Lake Tahoe and moving west along serveral popular bike routes, USBR 50 climbs the Sierra Nevada, winds through the Sacramento Delta and traverses the Bay Area, ending with a ferry ride across the San Francisco Bay into the city.

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