This past weekend, a group of us participated in the Pleasanton Tri for Fun. It is a sprint distance triathlon: 400 yard swim, 11 mile bike, and 3.1 mile run. There are no official times, so the race is fairly low key. In fact, many of the participants do their first tri at the Tri for Fun.
Josh Redstone and I did the whole triathlon while Peter Brende (swim), Jeremy Cotter (bike), and Ryan Barrett (run) did it as a relay. This was Josh and Jeremy's first tri, so congrats to them! We had a really good time and all completed the event successfully.
The lovely Tina woke up before sunrise with us to take pictures of the whole thing. She's something special. :)
Monday, June 22, 2009
Castle Rock
Tina and I went camping at Castle Rock State Park a couple of weeks ago. We got a bunch of backpacking gear from REI as wedding presents, and this was our first chance to use all of it at once!
Castle Rock is just South of Hwy 9 on Skyline. Here's a map to the parking lot where you can park overnight:
View Larger Map
The State Park website has a nice brochure that contains a map to the campground. Camping plus parking was only $10 for the night. What a deal!
We drove into the parking lot on Saturday afternoon, got a little orientation from the ranger stationed at the entrance, and started on our hike. The campground is about three miles away from the parking lot, and the scenery is beautiful the whole way. It starts out with a canopy of tall trees that blocks out enough sunlight that there is very little underbrush. Large sandstone boulders are popular with rock climbers.
About a mile into the hike, the view really opens up:
We arrived at the campsite well before dark. It was empty except for a small group of Boy Scouts. We picked a secluded site and set up camp. During the evening and night, the rangers came by multiple times to make sure that we had not started a campfire. The fire danger in the area is very high, so they were extraordinarily cautious.
In the morning, we took an alternate route back to the parking lot. Along the way, we discovered the largest forest of poison oak that I've ever seen.
All of the low, leafy plants in the picture are poison oak! Tina didn't like the idea of walking past it, but we didn't have a choice. Amazingly, we didn't catch any of it.
In all, we had a great time at Castle Rock. I highly recommend it for a day hike as well as for backpacking overnight.
Castle Rock is just South of Hwy 9 on Skyline. Here's a map to the parking lot where you can park overnight:
View Larger Map
The State Park website has a nice brochure that contains a map to the campground. Camping plus parking was only $10 for the night. What a deal!
We drove into the parking lot on Saturday afternoon, got a little orientation from the ranger stationed at the entrance, and started on our hike. The campground is about three miles away from the parking lot, and the scenery is beautiful the whole way. It starts out with a canopy of tall trees that blocks out enough sunlight that there is very little underbrush. Large sandstone boulders are popular with rock climbers.
About a mile into the hike, the view really opens up:
We arrived at the campsite well before dark. It was empty except for a small group of Boy Scouts. We picked a secluded site and set up camp. During the evening and night, the rangers came by multiple times to make sure that we had not started a campfire. The fire danger in the area is very high, so they were extraordinarily cautious.
In the morning, we took an alternate route back to the parking lot. Along the way, we discovered the largest forest of poison oak that I've ever seen.
All of the low, leafy plants in the picture are poison oak! Tina didn't like the idea of walking past it, but we didn't have a choice. Amazingly, we didn't catch any of it.
In all, we had a great time at Castle Rock. I highly recommend it for a day hike as well as for backpacking overnight.
Monday, June 1, 2009
Giro d'Italia
I watched the Giro d'Italia during the month of May on Universal Sports. It is a lot like the Tour de France: lots of long days on the bike, big mountains to climb, different types of stages, and enthusiastic fans.
The end of the race was incredible. Denis Menchov had a 20 second lead on Danilo Di Luca going into the last stage of the race which was an individual time trial through the streets of Rome. It started to rain as the leaders got on the course. Menchov was doing really well until the last kilometer (takes a little while to load and there's a commercial). Oh man, was that exciting!
By the way, the commercial that runs before the Menchov clip is for a series of short documentaries about Cervelo Test Team. You can watch them at bartape.net. I recommend taking the time to watch them. The production quality is surprisingly high, and I found it very interesting to see what goes on behind the scenes of a bike race.
The end of the race was incredible. Denis Menchov had a 20 second lead on Danilo Di Luca going into the last stage of the race which was an individual time trial through the streets of Rome. It started to rain as the leaders got on the course. Menchov was doing really well until the last kilometer (takes a little while to load and there's a commercial). Oh man, was that exciting!
By the way, the commercial that runs before the Menchov clip is for a series of short documentaries about Cervelo Test Team. You can watch them at bartape.net. I recommend taking the time to watch them. The production quality is surprisingly high, and I found it very interesting to see what goes on behind the scenes of a bike race.
Overgrown
Those are the steps that lead from our driveway to the front door. You can see that they're a little overgrown. Tina says that they need a Brazilian wax. :)PS- In writing this post, I came across this rather entertaining video (somewhat risque if you are at work).
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