Lodi is flat, hot, and full of grapes. It lies on the eastern edge of the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta in the Central Valley, where the land is so level you can watch weather move across it for an hour before it arrives. This spot sits near Woodbridge, just north of Lodi itself, close to where the Mokelumne River runs west out of the Sierra foothills toward the Delta.
The Lodi area has been growing grapes for well over a century and is famous for old-vine Zinfandel, with gnarled, head-trained vines, some of them planted generations ago, standing in sandy soil that phylloxera never got hold of in the same way it did elsewhere. Tasting rooms are scattered all around town. Many people also know the name from the Creedence Clearwater Revival song about a musician stuck in Lodi again, which John Fogerty wrote without, by his own account, ever having been here.
The swim is the Mokelumne. Lodi Lake, a park on the river just north of downtown, has a sandy beach and a designated swimming area in summer, and locals cool off in the slow, greenish water when the valley heat climbs above thirty-five degrees Celsius, which it frequently does from June to September. The river can have surprisingly strong currents and cold water released from upstream dams, so swim where others swim and do not underestimate it.
As for the riding, it is not a twisty landscape. Roads are straight and flat, crossing vineyards, orchards and canals at right angles, with the occasional levee road snaking along the Delta channels. Those levee roads, out west toward Walnut Grove and Isleton, are the best part: narrow tarmac on top of embankments, water on one side and farmland below on the other, drawbridges, old river towns with wooden buildings and a slow, sleepy atmosphere. Watch for farm trucks, crosswinds in the afternoon and tule fog in winter, a thick ground fog that can drop visibility to almost nothing.
Lodi is a city of over sixty thousand with every service you could want, from fuel and food to bike shops. On a hot summer return, the best plan is to ride early, swim in the afternoon, and finish the run back toward the Bay Area in the evening, when the Delta breeze comes in from the west and the temperature finally drops.