day 2

27 May 2008



The first half of todays ride was awesome. There is a bike trail following the river all the way through Sacramento. It was very nice to be away from traffic on a bike route. We rode somewhere around 25 miles on bike trails getting through Sacramento.

After that we had a horrible map day. The directions were very confusing, and we had to backtrack multiple times. The road were busy and the shoulder non-existent, too. When we finally got into Placerville, we were very frustrated and tired. We talked to a really nice guy, Jeff, at Pizza Pro, and he recommended a different route for us. Our campground was quite a ways off the trail, and Jeff said we could take a bike trail and then another road that would take us to the campground and would be shorter. I was sick of the maps by that time, so we decided to try it out. The bike trail was super ... until it turned to dirt. After that we tried to use the GPS to figure out how to get the rest of the way there. Before we could figure it out the batteries died. We were fairly frustrated by then, so we just got on the freeway and rode it because we knew it would get us there. It started pouring on us just as we got to the campground.

So our day started great, and ended not great. We rode 79 miles and climbed to 3500 feet.