This weekend Cathy and I went to Mendocino to stay at Stevenswood and get some cycling in. Cathy has never really ridden anything serious and she only has a commuter bike, but she did terrificly! I set up the maps of the trip on Bikely.com since Google Maps is just so damn painful for this sort of application, and mapmyride.com is not much better. Click on the map titlebar for options so you can see the elevation charts and what-not. It is a very cool site.
On Valentine's Day we did this ride and it was a lot more elevation than we expected, but it was a very fun ride! There were some pretty rough spots on CR 409 so I was glad our tires had a little width to them. A road bike would have been tough here. We did this route counterclockwise.
On Monday 2/15/10 we did what I thought would be a steeper ride and it turned out to be pretty mellow and about 5 miles shorter. We did this route clockwise.
I would definitely recommend these rides and beginner to intermediate. Both had moderate climbing grades, beautiful scenery, and very rewarding downhill.
