We spent four days riding in beautiful central California wine country. Although we were with a group called Southern California Tandem Riders with over twenty other couples participating, we spent most of the weekend and all but 15 miles riding by ourselves. Luckily, we really enjoy each other’s company! I’m not complaining…we were thrilled to ride in a new area and enjoyed all of the climbing opportunities presented. As the late, great Glenn Erickson taught us on many European adventures, if you don’t climb…you don’t get the views!

Full disclosure: there were many opportunities to be with the group but in most cases we opted out and chose to do our own thing. Most of our socializing happened at breakfast and at the evening social hour sponsored by the lovely Oxford Suites.

The mornings were quite cool (about 50 degrees each day) and many of the couples chose to do a delayed (warmer) start. We rode through fruit orchards and grape vines. And passed countless wineries. We don’t understand how they can all exist, but apparently there are over 200 wineries in Paso Robles.

Meanwhile, back in Paso Robles…for those of you who took French in high school, “robles” means “oaks” in Spanish. So the “oaks pass” is a wine town AND a beer town. There were many opportunities to visit local breweries, starting with this one right across the street from our hotel.

Friday night was a pizza party, and a showing of a documentary about Los Angeles-area tandem rider Tim Skipper. He does RAAM (Race Across America) every year. You can look him up!

It was a holiday weekend and on Saturday there was a Pioneer Day parade which we didn’t attend. In our experience riding later in the day equals more traffic, and some of these roads were pretty busy, so we headed out on our own morning adventure.

After lunching at a deli in Tin City (three miles from our hotel) we visited the Negranti Creamery and had some handcrafted ice cream.

Firestone Walker is a famous brewery that has its main headquarters in Paso Robles so we HAD to visit.

The Sunday group ride didn’t work out for us either. Most of the riders were doing the longest option which went to the town we had visited the day before. We chose the middle distance option with a little more climbing. The routes were different from the start so we were on our own again.

Good luck making a choice. The eclair we picked was perfect.

The final ride was supposed to be a remote start almost thirty miles away (and in the wrong direction for home). Obviously, we opted out of that one too. We rode a short 20-mile option which allowed us enough time to shower and hit the road before hotel checkout time.

After driving through a rainstorm that dropped about a month’s worth of rain on Los Angeles, we made it back to Orange County. It took three hours to drive 72 miles. Ugh.

Stay tuned…the “drive” for our annual 5,000-mile goal is on! Spoiler alert: less than 500 miles to go.

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