Week one is in the books...

The first week of the 2014 Photo/Ride Adventure Tour is in the books and has carried me from South Orange County to North San Diego County. Not a lot of mileage but since I'm not on a strict timetable as in times past, this should give me the opportunity to get better coverage of the areas I do visit.

A good example would be the time I've spent at South Carlsbad State Park. In the past I would have stayed for a sunset and sunrise and taken whatever I happened to capture. In this case, the first two sunsets were rather bland and didn't really get me anything good. The third however got some interesting cloud formations that yielded this image.

Copyright Eric Foltz

With limited features other than a lot of wide open stretches of sand, finding some rocks to put in the foreground made all the difference. It's not the best beach image I have but I'm pretty happy with being able to get something good from this location.

I was able to put up pretty good mileage on the bikes (plural). I did some mountain biking while I was up in San Clemente and have been mixing it up with road biking when the trails weren't convenient.

I've managed to ride the Southern California coast from Seal Beach to La Jolla with a couple of inland loops to keep it interesting.

Riding in San Diego County really makes you appreciate how good the roads in South OC really are. PCH through SD is one cracked, potholed, lumpy mess in a lot of places. The views are spectacular but taking your eyes off the pavement in front of you is risking death.

The STRAVA Heatmap so far:

I'll probably have a hard time turning anything red this year, but I predict there will be blue lines all over the place by year's end.

I was hoping to hit around 5000 new segments by the end of the year, but I'm thinking that number might be a little conservative since I've already added around 300 in just the first week. It's is really amazing to see what happens when you ride something in the opposite direction from what you do normally. Yesterday and today, I rode north along the coast where I had only ridden south previously and added 200+ segments. All those STRAVA users have been busy.


The real challenge will be adding to this map which shows everywhere I've ridden in the U.S.:

 

Mountain bike rides are green, road are red and my tour route is in gold. I'm looking forward to adding a lot of new color to this map.