NorCal Cycling

[George Schick]

At this time of the year I have to admit that I'm a bit jealous of cyclists who live in California, especially in the the NoCal area of the "Frisco" bay.  Lately I've been leering enviously at YouTube videos posted by "Henry Wildberry" where he and his riding companion(s) are cycling up and down some excellent North Bay area hilly/mountainous paths and roads equipped with little more than "fair weather" garments vs. what we have to wear in the Midwest Winters. Makes me want to move there...but not really.

[Luke Hendrickson]

Dude living in San Francisco here: it’s pretty great 💅🏻

[Ryan Frahm]

I enjoy watching those videos as well! I could never keep up with he or Ms Cools but those rides look beautiful! 

[Piaw Na]

It's not hype. The Bay Area has the best winter cycling in the world. But you don't have to live here to enjoy it --- come visit for a few days in winter with your bike. It's not a coincidence that the spate of outdoor companies in the 1980s (Patagonia, Power Bar, Clif Bar, Specialized, Ritchey, North Face, in addition to Rivendell) all started here.

[Mike Godwin]

Or make your winter riding destination the Central Coast of California, San Luis Obispo for winter riding. Less traffic, same great riding weather!

Mike SLO CA 

[John Dewey]

Well, LONELY PLANET disagrees, with this to say: 

https://www.lonelyplanet.com/articles/best-places-for-a-cycling-holiday

I've lived both places as cyclist, and confirm LP. Athens, with its year-round warm sunny days, an endless matrix of beautiful quiet country lanes (i.e. no traffic), delightful hills (mountains neaby), pine forests, no traffic is a cycling wonderland like no other. Not comparable. Add the music, UGA for culture, enviable culinary arts, ticks all the boxes. 

https://www.flickr.com/photos/146626768@N06/albums/72157709138882807

Jock Dewey

On Friday, December 16, 2022 at 7:21:17 AM UTC-8 pi...@gmail.com wrote:

[Piaw Na(藍俊彪)]

I've been to Athens. It definitely doesn't have mountains comparable to what you can find in the Santa Cruz mountains. The sheer variety of terrain from desert to open fields to redwood forests in the Bay Area beats Athens. For food, try getting great Asian food (Chinese, Japanese and Indian) in Athens. It's not even close. I will say that the archaeological/ancient monuments in Athens beats the heck out of anything in the Bay Area. I'd say that music in the Bay Area can be pretty good, but not being big on nightlife I can't say that I'd be authoritative on it.

For cycling, the only places I think are comparable (still a step down) are Mallorca and Girona in Spain. I did a superlative trip to those places before the pandemic (https://blog.piaw.net/2019/05/index-2019-mallorca-and-girona-fixed.html), and they are outstanding because the number of cyclists in Mallorca feels like you're in a century ride every day (cyclists outnumber car drivers on most of the mountain roads!), and the large number of hotels/apartments in the area means you get very good prices for lodging. But I'd still say that the food in the Bay Area for sheer diversity beats what you can find in either Mallorca and Girona. Even then their hills aren't comparable to what I'd find in the Bay Area. Bay Area mountains are suitable preparation for the alps or the Sierras. Everything in Mallorca and Girona is gentle by comparison. But of course, that means that Bay Area cyclists regularly need low gears (24x36 back in the pre-1x drivetrain days, 40x51 or 38x51 nowadays) that other locations do not require. Some people find that to be a bug and not a feature.

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[Wesley]

I think John was talking about Athens, Georgia. I've visited but never cycled there, and can confirm that there is food every bit as excellent as you'll find anywhere. Especially if you're into soul food or barbecue.

-W

[Piaw Na]

Athens Georgia ranks even below Girona on that lonely planet list, and I would still consider that a step down (though at least not an entire staircase down). I would take lonely planet with a grain of salt, since the thread started with winter cycling, and SF Bay Area is about 5 degrees warmer than Athens, GA with less rain (which is not a feature if you're living here --- we're in the midst of a multi-year drought!).

[Garth]

The best winter cycling for me is no winter at all. No compromises or adaptations.

Summer, Summer, and Summer and Summer. I Love Summer.... HOT, HUMID Green and Balmy SUMMMMMMMER !

Where there are few to none "cyclists" around. In other words, where cycling isn't popular and there is no such thing as "popular culture" to be found.

Where is such a place ? 

Right where One could never lose or find.... The Heart. Home, Heaven, is The Heart..... and where's isn't The Heart .... but nowhere ?

 

[Wesley]

Winter cycling in colder climates is a fresh and wonderful form of joy. We lived in Madison, Wisconsin for seven years and commuting by riding straight across Lake Mendota was incredibly fun. Plus, I often had the paths to myself and got a lot of entertainment from taking on big snow berms. Ice and slush were a lot less fun, though. To each their own - I'll certainly agree that NorCal can be a lovely place to ride. The things that surprised me, though, are how incredibly narrow the roads are, and how most trails prohibit cycling.

-W

[Piaw Na(藍俊彪)]

The Loma Prieta branch of the Sierra Club actively fought trail access for mountain bikers in the area. It's something many of us here will never forgive them for. Nevertheless, there are a lot of good trails that are worth riding available, many of which see no more than 2 cyclists an hour. Pre-pandemic they were even less used but with the rise of gravel bikes I'm starting to see more traffic.

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[Jay Lonner]

+1 on the joys of winter cycling. I lived in Madison for 4 years, and commuted by bike year-round. It helped a lot that the city was good about snow and ice removal, although all the salt pretty much trashed the components on my X0-1 after my first winter there. I ended up turning a Goodwill frame into a dedicated singlespeed commuter, and with Nokian studded tires never had any real issues. Compare that to the laissez faire attitude toward dealing with snow and ice back in the PNW – a few weeks ago I hit a patch of black ice and went right down. My first spill in many years — dinged up my handlebars a bit, but was lucky enough to avoid injury. I’ll confess that it’s made me a bit gunshy about riding here in freezing temperatures. Having said that, I still prefer cycling in the cold and wet to riding in hot and sticky weather (although Madison had a fair amount of that as well).

Jay Lonner

Bellingham, WA

Sent from my Atari 400

On Dec 16, 2022, at 11:38 AM, Wesley <brooks...@gmail.com> wrote:

Winter cycling in colder climates is a fresh and wonderful form of joy. We lived in Madison, Wisconsin for seven years and commuting by riding straight across Lake Mendota was incredibly fun. Plus, I often had the paths to myself and got a lot of entertainment from taking on big snow berms. Ice and slush were a lot less fun, though. To each their own - I'll certainly agree that NorCal can be a lovely place to ride. The things that surprised me, though, are how incredibly narrow the roads are, and how most trails prohibit cycling.

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[Michael Moore, Jr.]

The Bay Area isn't Northern California says the guy from Humboldt County. We have way less traffic and better air. 😉

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[Patrick Moore]

Really wonderful photos. I'm very pleased that Athens is so rideable. I haven't been there for almost 50 years since we visited an aunt on home leave; we stayed mostly in Decatur which always struck me as a horrible place to ride. 

Curious: Is that your photography? It seems professional grade to me, tho' my knowledge of photography is minimal and my skills even minimaler.

[Philip Williamson]

If you have a Safeway, you're in Northern California. 

If you've got a Vons, you're in SoCal.

Philip 

Sonoma County, Calif (born in SF) 

[Matthew Williams]

I thought the way you knew Northern from Southern California was if people named freeways with “The”:

“This is the 101” = you’re in Southern California

 

“This is 101” = you’re in Northern California

 

“That was Highway 101” = you’re listening to a classic rock station

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[Joe Bernard]

The differentiation for me when I moved north in 1988 is there's spaces between towns in Northern California. If you grew up in LA/Orange Counties you understood towns as different signs on the same vast concrete landscape. 

[Eric Norris]

Southern California: Distance expressed in time (Anaheim is 45 minutes from here)

Northern California: Distance expressed in miles (Folsom is 12 miles away)

And yes, up here the cities have actual edges, where you’re out in the country on the way to the next city.

--Eric N, Who Moved From SoCal to NorCal 25 years Ago and Has Never Looked Back

On Dec 20, 2022, at 2:30 PM, Joe Bernard <joer...@gmail.com> wrote:

The differentiation for me when I moved north in 1988 is there's spaces between towns in Northern California. If you grew up in LA/Orange Counties you understood towns as different signs on the same vast concrete landscape. 

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[Curtis McKenzie]

Philip just may have something there.

https://local.safeway.com/safeway/ca.html

Curtis

"Who occasionally shops at Safeway"

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[Piaw Na(藍俊彪)]

This is hilarious. I'll pile on with my brother's story. He got rejected by UC Berkeley and accepted by UCLA. Not to be deterred, he wrote an appeal letter that stated: "Don't let me go to UCLA. After 4 years there I won't know what a tree looks like." UC Berkeley reversed its denial and enrolled him.

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[Eric Norris]

The San Francisco Randonneurs are notorious for using Safeways as controls on their brevets. If you know the layout for a typical Safeway, you can save a lot of time hunting for your favorite rest stop snacks when you’re riding with SFR.

--Eric N

On Dec 20, 2022, at 2:59 PM, Piaw Na <pi...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[Joe Bernard]

On an entirely unrelated note, I mentioned on Twitter last week that I finally noticed the name, Safeway..why is it called that?? I'm informed that back in the olden times before FDA it was a promise of safe food. So there ya go. 

[James Warren]

When a Mason-Dixon line needs to be established in CA, it'll be called the Safeway-Vons line.

Quiz: for any major north-south freeway or highway, what are the two cities that straddle the Safeway-Vons line?

Related question: King City: which store do they have?

Related Cliff Claven Trivia: when I was a kid growing up in Los Angeles and San Diego suburbs, Vons and Safeway were two different stores. In 1989 they merged, and all of our Southern California Safeways got renamed Vons. So many of our suburban shopping centers ended up with two Vons's as anchors on either end when it used to be Safeway at one end and Vons at the other.

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[Peter Adler]

1-2) King City (on 101) and Fresno (on Hwy 99) appear to be the southernmost outposts of Safeway on major highways. It looks like Vons picks up in Bakersfield (99) and Goleta, outside Santa Barbara (101). Interstate 5 is on the dry west side of the San Joaquin Valley, so it doesn't really have much in the way of large towns or accompanying supermarkets; there's a Save Mart in Coalinga just off the highway, and another in Visalia on 99.

Bakersfield has two Vons and three Wal-Marts.

3) Something similar happened up here in the Bay Area about 12 years ago, when a small local chain named Andronico's* went under. Safeway bought up all the Andronico's real estate and outstanding leases, converting the store on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley's Gourmet Ghetto (across the street from Chez Panisse, in the same block as the Cheese Board, two blocks from the Mother Peet's) into a Safeway in spite of the fact that Safeway owned a newly redeveloped store one block away. Continuing further along Shattuck through the Solano Tunnel to Solano Avenue, there's an Andronico's-turned-Safeway about one mile away (north, roughly) from the original Shattuck Safeway. Then, continuing west along Solano into neighboring Albany, there's a Safeway that was always a Safeway one mile west of the Upper Solano ex-Andronico's Safeway.

I find the logic of this multiplicity confusing. And to top it off, one mile north of the Lower Solano Safeway is El Cerrito Plaza, which contains a Lucky's Supermarket - a chain which, like Safeway, is owned by the Albertson's Group. The former Andronico'ses in Berkeley have been rebranded as "Andronico's Community Markets", but the merch is much the same as the alternating Safeways, and the same newspaper sales prices apply.

If Kroger and Albertson's merge, then it'll be Buy n Large from coast to coast outside the southeast.

*originally based in SF's Inner Sunset district; they'd bought up a few other local chains, including the two stores that the Berkeley Co-op owned outright when they shut down in 1988 - the original store on University Avenue (my home store, where my dad was a board member and the newspaper publisher in the 60s) and the fancy store on Shattuck in the Gourmet Ghetto. The land was worth more than the organization; the 99-year lease for the Telegraph/Ashby store was sold to Whole Foods

Peter "the old story was that the frontier was the Tehachapi" Adler

plus ça change, plus c'est la même supermarché en

Berkeley, CA/USA

[Wesley]

The multiplicity is because when large grocery chains merge, the federal government often requires the new, larger, chain to keep the original stores open. In cases like where you now have two Safeways in the same mall, Safeway will generally be required to sell one to a competitor rather than close it. This is all part of an effort to avoid monopolies in grocery stores.

-Wes

[George Schick]

Wesley - thanks for that info.  It explains why we have had the closures of certain grocery stores in our area that have ultimately been taken over by larger chains, but retained their original identity.  But many of these "overtaken" groceries have eventually declined in product availability and produce value over time, which makes me wonder what the intent of the larger "take over" chain had in mind to begin with.  Unless their strategy may have been to take over all of the subordinate chain stores (required by law, as you say) and gradually ferret out the money losers as time goes along, eventually closing some of those stores and keeping others open.  I'm sure it's a difficult market strategy.

[Wesley]

George,

When a two grocery chains merge to create a new, larger chain, they would prefer to close down any of their stores that compete with each other right away. It's the federal government that stops them, because then they could raise prices with less competition. So instead they underinvest in the stores they don't want. When they are required to sell some stores to a competitor, they do whatever they can to make sure those stores aren't successful for their new owners. Kroger and Albertsons both want to be monopolies, and they are good at pursuing that goal.

-Wes

[Wesley]

Oh, I almost forgot: two months ago, Kroger and Albertsons announced a plan to merge. They are the two biggest grocery chains in the US, and I do not know whether the federal government will try to stop the merger. In California, that would mean Ralphs would join the Vonn's/Safeway/Albertson's/Pavilion's family of brands. Here are lists of the stores that would be involved in the merger:

[George Schick]

Wesley - thanks for the excellent information!  Yes, in the area where I live - Northeastern Chicago suburbs - some of the stores owned by the now defunct local chain "Dominick's" were taken over and remodeled by a more local chain "Mariano's".  That chain has since been taken over by the the Kroger dynasty and some of those grocery's are not fairing well.  Meanwhile, a larger local chain, "Jewell," has long since been taken over by the massive Albertsons.  So a merger between those two conglomerates comes as no surprise, though it does come with a bit of fear and loathing.  Once the two giants merge (assuming the FTC allows it) they can manipulate pricing and availability all over the map.  I doubt that this would be a good thing for the average consumer, but such seems to be the way things in general retail are going nowadays.

George

P.S. Sorry this thread drifted from NoCal riding weather to the food supply industry, but it's all good info.

[Mike Godwin]

Vons on "The" 101 starts in Paso Robles, though I've never shopped there. I have shopped at the Safeway in Atascadero, SLO, King City, Salinas, Gilroy, Hollister, and Morgan Hill.

Mike "no longer in "the" bay area Godwin SLO CA 

[Philip Williamson]

I think Hwy 41 might be the NorCal/SoCal cutoff, which is weird, since like all odd-numbered freeways, it’s technically a north-south road.

It angles in the west, but heads straight north in the east, putting Morro Bay, Kettleman City, Fresno, and Yosemite and Lee Vining all on the dividing line. Which I would accept. That feels pretty solid.  

Philip

“The eights go east and the fives go north.”

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[Matthew Williams]

We also have the line between Northern California and Crazypants California. You know you’re in Crazypants California when you pass the State Of Jefferson Barn on Interstate 5.

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