Weekend Cruise: Saturday

I’ve spent way too much time in my house these past few weeks (yeah, I know I’m just making-up for being on the road so much this past year), but I needed to get out for a little while. I started asking around if people would be interested in going for a cruise this weekend.

While most of the NorCal GOATs were interested in doing a Sunday Cruise, there were a few G8’s that wanted to do something on Saturday. Sunday the cruise is planned to go to Half Moon Bay, so I figured we could do something towards Santa Cruz on Saturday. Unfortunately there wasn’t enough interest to do the “long route” (~94 miles total), so we did the “shorter than a marathon route” instead:

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A total of three G8’s arrived for the cruise (including myself), all GT models. While it might have been nice to have a few more cars, the fewer the number of people trying to stick together on the roads the easier (and more enjoyable to lead) the drive becomes. Given the simplicity of the route, and that everyone had walkie-talkies, leading the cruise was fairly enjoyable… other than the slow cars and cyclists that wanted to become hood ornaments.

The first road we drove was the Page Mill Rd. as an up-hill. I knew there were some crazy cyclists in the Bay Area, but this is a very steep road… and other than the kamakazi downhill afterwards… I can see no reason why anyone would ever want to ride up this road. Unfortunately, the cyclists don’t think like me… and there were quite a few on the road today. Having to take the time to look around corners for cyclists crawling uphill really slowed things down, but not nearly as much as getting stuck behind a slow driver! Home come whenever we drive on a road a slow car gets in the way?

Once we reached Skyline Blvd. the slow car moved out of the way and we were able to have some fun. Skyline is one of my favorite roads in this area… not because it’s fast or technical, but because it is consistently fun. The posted speed limit is high enough that you don’t get stuck vehicles crawling along. The road has just enough twists/turns to keep things interesting, without being so tight that tourists have to slow down. Today was no different, and Skyline was a pleasure to drive.

My biggest surprise came when we turned onto Hwy 9 for the return trip towards Saratoga… there were no cars in front of us. For the entire 5 mile decent we had open road to push things as hard as we desired… and push we did! At one point I even had to slow to keep from catching air over a crest. I can only hope that the drive tomorrow will be anything close to as much fun!