After some inspiration on the Seattle and Portland Rivendell Rumble the California folks decided to their own Rivendell Rumble. After a couple weeks of planning and a few email exchanges The SoCal and NoCal Rivendell Rumble was on!
When it comes to planning and organizing rides I am by far the worse person to do such things. It was the helpful input from the SoCal folks that really made it happened. Having a date and place led to making sure we all met around the same time. Not really a easy feat when you are trying to coordinate ETA from folks four hours away. Luckily Doug was the smart one who exchanged numbers with most of the folks. After driving "adult" speeds to get to SLO I get to the camp first. In terms of the folks that rolled in it was Jim that came first then Mitch. We called Doug and found out that Doug, Evan and Hugh got separated on their ride to the campgrounds. Seemed like they had their own kind of fun before the start of the ramble. Doug told us not to wait up and to go riding. So we did. Not really knowing the area we decided to go up something. With the help directions from Mitch who was the local around here parts, we opted to ride up a local bouldery peak call Bishop Peak. Or at least we tried to until we had to ditch our bikes half way up the top. Funny thing is that when we got close to the top we got a call from Doug who said they were around so and so road of which we could see three cyclists riding on. Cool. Jim and I using a "short-cut" through the campgrounds got to finally meet the rest of the group plus the only other NoCal folk, Mike who were already settling into camp. It's always an amazing thing when I meet other folks on the list. Despite never meeting them in person it felt like I'm hanging out with old friends that you haven't seen in a while. It's great because I always have this fear that when I meet RBW forum folks that it's going to be weird. Luckily things did get weird but in a good way. We started dinner with some BBQ calamari then worked out way to some elbow sausage pasta that Jim brought and Hugh cooked. The rumble was more of a geeky bike talk event as we talked about bike and life related stuff. Surprisingly we talked about a lot of folks on the list and how we would love to meet them sometime...(more on this later). We kept talking until one of us noted that it was 1230am after which we instantly departed to our sleeping bags to get ready for the real rumble the next day. We wake up to some coffee, bacon wrapped hotdogs and some special Mitch donut delivery to fuel us for our ride that day. I figured it was a horrible idea for me to try and plan a ride route so Doug suggested a route and we all followed suit. Doug took us on this beautiful climb up to to short gravel road that top us to see the tip of the Morro Bay Rock covered in fog. The descent down was amazing and we continued to town to have sandwiches. On our return ride back to the campgrounds despite being full Mike instigated some friendly racy tactics that led us to finish the ride sweaty and crampy. All in good fun. We vowed to try to make it an annual thing and figured a Oregon vs California Rivendell Rumble needs to happen... It's amazing how great it was to meet the faces behind the names and how it felt so natural to ride and hang out with such a great group. Lets make this West Coast Rivendell Rumble happen! Pictures Proved that internet friend can be real friends too: http://flic.kr/s/aHsjHaw4Qr -Manny "Lolipops suck" Acosta -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to rbw-owners-bunch@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
