SF2G Bike rides from San Francisco to Mountain View

After gaining some basic long rides practice I finally decided to give a shot to the SF2G rides. Given the preparation and practice I had it did look like a stupid idea but some one offered to make it a no-one-left-behind ride and that left me no excuses :)

There a 4 well known/documented routes available from sf2g.com, the Bayway is the considered the simplest one and definitely the one to start with for beginners. The route is pretty easy indeed with mostly flat roads (except for 3 small inclines in the beginning) and also most of the time roads with little risks to bicyclists because of dedicated lanes and less traffic, which comes at the cost of making the directions pretty complicated. Even after doing my second ride already I am not sure I can complete the ride without some one else leading the way.

The route is very scenic and if the weather gets favourable like it did last 2 rides for it, it makes the 42 miles ride of about 3-3:30 hour go by quickly.

On the way waiting for fellow ride to change the tube after a flat

If you are a biker in San Francisco city heading to South Bay feel free to join us on one of these rides. Note that There are other sub-routes of shorter distances like Millbrae to MV and Foster city to MV and such. Visit the website for more details.

Additional fun things: Use "My tracks" app in Android phones to track your path and get detailed stats about the rides.

View Sf2g 2 in a larger map

Sorry not enough photos from this ride, may be using Street view would help :)

Biking fun! My new road bike and accessories

One of the luxuries you can't miss to afford living in the Bay Area is comfortable Cycling workouts. The weather is usually perfect and roads are pretty flat and smooth and quite a few have biking lanes. (Not forgetting to mention Google has recently released biking directions which adds favourably to this experience).

Bike purchase decision
So after discussing with few experienced bikers I decided to buy a good road bike, visited the performance biking shop nearby to realize they didn't sell Trek and then visited the Chain Reactions bicycle store in Redwood city on recommendation that they actually allow you to test ride your bike for 4 miles trail before buying it which is pretty important to decide buying a bike.

In chain reaction shop I tried a couple of bikes as usual as the price went up the feeling seemed to improve :) I also had a strong preference for color of the bike (and therefore looks of it), both these factors concluded on me buying a Trek 2.1 Alpha bike which is a Aluminum frame bike as that seems to be slightly more sturdier than Carbon frames and a good one to start biking. I must say after riding this for about 300 KMs or so I fell in love with this bike and kinda addicted to biking whenever possible.

From Biking

Road Biking shoes and Clip-on Pedals
After I put about 400 KMs or so and figured I am going to take it seriously and bought Road Biking shoes which made me switch the pedal to the Clip-on pedals. After getting them on and trying it I immediately felt I have definitely not thought well enough before deciding, as it was a major change and had a bit of learning curve during which biking became uncomfortable. Including a few falls as you are not accustomed to take off shoes from the pedal while stopping or just can't manage it in time.

This is how the pedal and shoes (with cleats) look like:

Anyways after trying it in the shop for a while and then adjusting the shoes a bit I came out and very soon had a fall :) and then few more later. I then turned to youtube for help and found these two good videos:




Weather has not been that great this winters so biking didn't work very well but its getting better now and last 2-3 weekends I have been pulling good distances. I was able to complete 40 miles in last attempt, which feels pretty good to sustain for a while and then improve upon. More on biking in next post.

Bike trip to SuryaLanka and Voderevu Beach

The weekend of June 13-14 the Google Hyderabad bikers club had a bike trip to SuryaLanka and Voderevu beach.

Numbers: 10 bikes, 1 car. 16 ppl, ~350 KM oneway. Cost: Fuel, about 20 Ltrs for round trip in most bikes. Food (about 100 Rs per meal). Accomodation (350 per head 2 days, AC :))

From SuryaLanka Bike trip

Now the details: We left at around 6:15 PM from Google office at Kondapur, Hyderabad (yeah bad timings, but we signed up for it :)). Soon as we reached Madhapur it started raining and got worse over next few minutes. There was some chaos because of the rains and before we could get to the petrol pump at road number 12 at least some of us weren't in the group anymore. After some confusion and stuff we finally got together at MPM mall at abids and started the ride again this time getting out of the city. It turned out the rains have slowed the traffic much further causing lots of roads being jammed, fortunately bikes could take the alternate muddy lanes and continue. Ultimately when we stopped just outside the city we had spent about 2.5 hrs and gone about 49 KM and most were pretty badly soaked.

From SuryaLanka Bike trip

The ride went quite fine after that, we stopped over at two three places in search of dinner finally managed to get food at the "Pal Punjabi Dhaba", which was pretty good. The rain had mostly stopped and riding speeds improved, though very soon we came to a single lane highway.

From SuryaLanka Bike trip

At around 2:00 AM or so came the first surprise of the trip, my bike's front tire got punchured. I was definitely among the less prepared ones as far as these surprises were concerned. Finally Ram and others managed to find a mechanic guy to come to the place where we halted and then the whole wheel was taken out and taken to a nearby shop for fixing the punchure. It took about 1 hr and 15 minutes before we could get back to start, just to realize that the car's battery has drained as they kept the indicator on all the while :D. Some pushing the car and we were back on the roads.

Besides this the onward journey didn't have any more unexpected stops and we reached our destination by about 9:15 in the morning taking enough breakes during the night and speeding quite a bit as the dawn came.

We had already decided to stay at Vodarevu because the only accomodation at Suryalanka, the Suryalanka beach resort by APTDC didn't have any vacancy so we went to Vodarevu and stayed at Vamsi Krishna Guess House the same place where we stayed in our last trip to Voderevu.
After resting for some time we decided to go for lunch to Bapatla which is about 12 Kms from Voderevu. Lunch was at ShreeGodavari restuarant, the non-veggie loved the prawns but the veggies like me didn't have a great experience with the meals.

Post lunch we went to SuryaLanka beach which is just 5 Kms from Bapatla, it was a nice ride and the beach was great too. Suryalanka is considered much better destination then Voderevu as the beach is cleaner and more targetted towards tourist compared to later being more of a fishing beach. I didn't wanted to lose the chance of getting in to the beach and went ahead alone spending some 10-15 minutes having fun with the waves before we decided to head back to Voderevu.

After we returned Ram figured out that we could take our bikes to the beach and ride them there. What a nice surprise! Most of us were super excited and went ahead and spent the next 1 or 2 hrs biking on the beach. Two of the bullets didn't like the salt water much and gave quite a bit of troubles to the riders, ultimately as it got dark we took back our bikes to the lodge and later came back to the beach for Bonfire.

From SuryaLanka Bike trip

From SuryaLanka Bike trip

The bonfire was another experience of its own, with the very breezy winds it took about an hour of consistent effort and abour 3 Litres of fuel(petrol ?) to get the woods catch the fire, as quite a few of us enjoyed the drinks and scenic view and some nice chitchat.



The next morning some of us had the lovely breakfast of idly/dosa which I am super fond of, the prices were unbelievable each idly 1 Rs and dosa 3 bucks :) We went back to the beach on bikes though we were too late for the earlier plan of watching the sun-rise from the sea reaching at about 8 AM instead of 5:30 or so. I got a perfect reflection photo of my bike with great struggle but unfortunately my friend deleted all photos by mistake, damn you.

From SuryaLanka Bike trip

From SuryaLanka Bike trip

From SuryaLanka Bike trip

From SuryaLanka Bike trip

From SuryaLanka Bike trip

We left at about 9 AM or so back towards Hyderabad. The return journey was fun and exciting too as we had good rest in the night. There weren't too many surprises, Santosh's bullet had some trouble (which he got get fixed himself but we spent about 1 hr) and then Vivek's bike had a tire punchure. After taking our lunch quite late we started back for Hyderabad, we reached Narkatpally at about 7:30 PM. After which I would say we had about the toughest riding of the trip with just 1 lane road and too many trucks all the time. Our earlier target of cover the remaining 50 KM by 9:00 PM was soon to revised. Ultimately we reached outskirts of Hyderabad by about 10:30 PM.

This was my best bike ride till date and despite my earlier apprehension about driving in the night and all the risks involved it turned out to be wonderful. I am now looking forward to longer rides and seeing our photos many of my friends who missed it are now determined to come for the next one.

Bike trip to Bhongir fort and Medak Church

Last Sunday turned out to be a full day biking event. We were all waiting for the Monsoon season to begin so we can have some nice weather for such a trip. Almost as planned we(I ?) started at 5:30 AM from my house when we were supposed to start from Shopper's stop towards our destination. With some delays picking up ppl we eventually were all set to go at around 6:30 or so.

The first destination was chosen to be Bhongir fort as the only seasoned driver amongst us Kannan suggested that we go there first. Bhongir fort is pretty close to Hyderabad it would have been around 50 KM from shoppers stop on NH 202 towards Warangal and the road and traffic didn't trouble us much, as a result we were at the fort in around an hour. After a quick bite at a restaurant we started climbing up the fort which seemed like being composed of a single rock all the way up to top(which indeed is the case). The fort has very minimal remains and it was more like hiking on a mountain than anything, the good part was the strong and nice winds which were awesomely refreshing. We would stop every once in a while and enjoy the winds and the nice view of the town from top. The weather was pleasant all the while.

At around 10:30 we were already down and discussing about weather we should go to Medak or Warangal. Medak as I figured out on the previous night while collecting maps was on the opposite side of the city and would have required us to go back through Hyderabad. Warangal was on the other hand 145 KMs from the place where we stood. After lots of discussion we decided to go to Medak Church and postpone Warangal trip for some other weekend.

Medak Church is on HW 97 around 100 KM(at least) from Hyderabad. While we came back from Bhongir fort and were enjoying our lunch at the Pickles restaurant near Paradise, we wondered again if we should go to this place, Aditya and I were in favour of dinning heavy and going back home as the destination was definitely more than 70 KMs away(various sources of information were not maching :)). Gene had "her" race to watch. But Kannan, Jhinuk and Ajay convinced Aditya and me to go.

After driving out of the city for more than 20 minutes, I saw a distance board mentioning the number 90 KM, but we had already come far enough to think about going back. We continued. The route is almost straight except forward except for a turn at a Gandhiji statue, which even after being warned one of the bike missed. The whole wrong route backtracking turned out to be pretty costly as we lost around 30-40 minutes and reached the Church only when it was 5 minutes from being closed. Kannan's information about the closing time being 6:30 went wrong again. It was 6:00 PM.

The short inside visit of the church was breathtaking the Church is indeed very beautiful. The paintings on the walls are simply one of the best piece of art I have seen. We so wanted to take photos but weren't allowed to and we soon ran out of time. The outer structure of the church is a monumental piece of architecture. The Church definitely happens to be biggest I have seen till now. From wikipedia article "With its massive dimensions, 100 ft width and 200 ft. length, the church can accommodate as many as 5000 people at a time."

The ride back to Hyderabad got pretty bad due to the darkness and very frequent diversions on the road which is under construction. The dinner was again at Pickles. My advise to Vegetarian folks don't expect much from this restaurant and don't by any chance order their veg sandwich. My Non-Veg friends did like the non veg sandwiches though.





















More Photos:
http://picasaweb.google.com/vardhman/BhongirFortMedakChurchBikeRide/

Some more photos from Aditya : http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/aditya.sahay/BikeTripWithGooglers

And some more from Ajay: http://picasaweb.google.com/ajay.vg/MedakBikeTrip