The original plan for my 50th was a family cruise to Alaska and it just so happened that there was one departing from San Francisco on my actual birthday, almost as if all the planets had aligned just for this occasion. My lovely wife kept the family together through the ordeals of last year and managed to, somehow, finish her Masters in Data Science and Analytics and her graduation ceremony would have been 5 days in to an 11 day cruise so we canned that idea so that we could attend the graduation ceremony. Sorry kids.
I really didn’t want a Polaroid of us all grinning inanely at Benihana’s to be my only memory of surviving 50 years on this planet, and there have been some pretty close calls to ‘surviving’ (I won’t list them just in case my mother ever reads this). I wanted to do something epic, something more lasting than the lingering smell of hibachi frying and, as entertaining as it is for the umpteenth time, I wanted something more than a guy tossing shrimp tails in to his chef’s hat and watching a ‘volcano’ made of onions. If you’ve never been to a Benihana then you obviously have no idea what I’m talking about, and there will be more of that in this blog.
I wouldn’t call myself a cyclist but I do enjoy the occasional ride. I’ve managed to do a century ride on some previous birthdays, a lap of the lovely Lake Tahoe on a mountain bike and early last year I biked to the visitor center on Haleakala in Maui, a grueling 50 mile 7200ft climb. I missed last year’s birthday century and have just been commuting about 10 miles a day to get back in to the swing of things on the road bike along with one 30 mile road trip in the beautiful hills of Los Altos and a weekend of mountain biking in beautiful Sedona.
I thought the famous Pacific Coastal Highway, the PCH, would be meet the requirements of an epic adventure so it was time to break it to the family……
Random musings of nobody important 