A quick ride up to SF

As luck would have it, yesterday afternoon did wind up being rain-free after all, so I got a short ride in.  Hooray!  I only had about 2 hours, so I just hightailed it up to San Francisco for the current Sport-Touring.net photo tag (the Dutch windmill in Golden Gate Park) and then rode home along the coast.

Photo tags work as follows:  someone posts a picture of their bike with a landmark/object/what have you.  The photo is “tagged” when another person takes a picture of their bike with the same object.  That new person then posts up the next object.

So, my first stop was to get the next photo.  I felt confident that no one was going to tag the windmill ahead of me, considering the previous tag (Sutro Towers) had stayed up for eight months.

 

 

The downside to this photo tag was that I inadvertently parked near a section of children’s graves (sons and daughters of veterans) and immediately became a blubbery pile of mush looking at headstones for 1 day old infants.  Curse you, hormones!

Fortunately a nice ride to Golden Gate Park with Ozzy Osbourne on the iPod solved most of that head space.  Thank goodness for motorcycling.

Wonderful colors as always in San Francisco:

I arrived at the windmill only to find it completely bereft of flowers.    It was so barren that I briefly thought, “am I at the right place?”  because, of course, the San Francisco landscape is simply overrun with Dutch windmills.

The funny part is — yes, actually, I did manage to go to THE WRONG WINDMILL.  It turns out that there are actually two in Golden Gate Park and I didn’t notice the difference in the original photo on STN.

I felt better about my sanity once I realized this…though it didn’t help with the photo tag. 😉

At any rate, here is the Murphy windmill, which was not the actual tag, but maybe the STN peeps will consider it good enough.

At least they were trying to get into the Halloween spirit!

After tagging the (wrong) windmill, I headed south along the Great Highway.  I stopped for a photo at Ocean Beach where I very nearly, but not completely, managed to conceal a trash can in this otherwise nice photo.

Riding along the Great Highway does not suck.

I continued south on Highway 1 down the coast.

The Devil’s Slide tunnel construction is coming along pretty nicely and there were good views coming into Pacifica:

Finally, of course, it’s pumpkin season in Half Moon Bay! Hooray!

I would, however, like to register a formal complaint that the Lemos Farm horse has now been painted the same way for over a month.  This will not do.  I require variety in my painted roadside horses.

Anyway, here are the ride stats.  This doesn’t include the 3.5 miles from my house to lunch, which I note for anal-retentive posterity.  Hey, when you’re only riding 100 miles or so a month, you want to record those extra 3.5 miles. 😉

It’s that time of year where rides involve an unhealthy obsession with staring at the weather websites; hopefully I’ll get another ride in next Tuesday, but the magic 8 ball is currently uncertain.  As of now, Monday’s weather is “Nice with clouds and sun”, “Turning cloudy” on Tuesday, and “Variable cloudiness” for Wednesday, which is pretty unhelpful in the planning department.  With any luck, it’ll be clear and I can head back to SF and go to the right windmill this time. 😉

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