Diablo Junction - 16 miles.

I got my car working this week so I drove in to work with the Klein on the roof and drove to North Gate Road at 5 o'clock. Jeff and Adam rode from work and were planning on riding home together down South Gate since they both live that way. When I got to the Gate I found Mark P who did the Death Ride a few weeks ago and who agreed to ride Tour d'Organics with me and Rick on the 21st. So at the Gate, Adam sprinted away and I rode with Mark and Jeff who didn't seem to be in any hurry. We got passed by a few folks and I figured it would be fun to chase them down later but we all got to talking and it never happened.

Mark told us about the Death Ride experience - he said at one stop a guy leaned his bike up against a bunch of other bikes in a rack and then tipped them all over, including Mark's: no serious damage but he needed some new handlebar tape anyway. He said he felt pretty good but at the last check point he called it quits and didn't do the 5th pass.

Jeff has some American Classic wheels on his new Orbea and a while ago I told him about a recall I heard about and he did have the recalled hub so the bike shop did the recall repair work on it and now the ratchet is much louder than it was and that's annoying. He also said the bike shop was irritated at American Classic since they only received vouchers to buy more American Classic componentry instead of getting reimbursed in cash for the labor they put into fixing all these wheels. The recall had to do with the ratchet failing so you could be just riding along and suddenly you would be unable to drive the wheel.

As we got close to the top, Mark and I pulled ahead of Jeff and then Adam came down after finishing his climb so he rode with Jeff; Mark and I finished together. Then we all BS'ed for a while and everybody went down. I got passed by a car that was going way too fast and then I got stuck behind a moped carrying two people who didn't know much about descending, but when I came across Nicole coming up I turned back around and climbed up a ways with her before I finished going down.