CURVESCOUT / MOTORCYCLE RIDE
Ordered leg totals agree within rounding. Stop distances are approximate sums of rounded legs. Stops, delays, approach and any separate return travel add time. Basis: producer-declared routed record.
Reading history stays on this device. My road watch requires a separate selection; opening it does not subscribe this ride.
Distance and riding time are measured on the routed road. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
A proper escape from San Francisco Bay Area with roads worth waking up for. Out of Woodside and back again: 576 km, roughly 8 h 58 in the saddle. On the way it passes Bolinas, Bodega Bay and Lodi. Half Moon Bay is the high point. The line favours views over speed.
Next is Santa Cruz Mountains Flow high point.
Half Moon Bay is where the Peninsula's mountains finally meet the Pacific. The town sits on a wide coastal plain, backed by the green flank of the Santa Cruz Mountains and fronted by a long crescent of sand, and it feels like a different state from the busy bay side only twenty minutes away over Highway 92. Fog arrives most summer afternoons, so mornings are your best bet for sun.
Read the complete Half Moon Bay write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
You top out here; the road stops climbing. Next is Santa Cruz Mountains Flow scenic road.
Bolinas does not want to be found, and it has made that clear for decades. Locals have a long tradition of removing the road sign that points to the town from Highway 1, so you may have to watch for the unmarked turnoff at the end of Bolinas Lagoon. The reward is a small, eccentric, salt-weathered village at the tip of a mesa on the Marin coast, with a few streets of old wooden buildings, a beach, surfers and an atmosphere that feels decades removed from the Bay Area just over the hill.
Read the complete Bolinas write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 112 km into the recorded legs you reach Santa Cruz Mountains Flow scenic road. Next is Santa Cruz Mountains Flow photo pull-off.
Alfred Hitchcock knew a menacing landscape when he saw one, and in 1962 he brought Tippi Hedren and a great many crows and gulls to Bodega Bay to film The Birds. The little harbour town on the Sonoma Coast, about an hour and a half north of the Golden Gate, has been living gently off that fame ever since, and the old schoolhouse that appears in the film still stands a few miles inland in the village of Bodega. But the real show here is the coast itself: a sheltered bay full of fishing boats, a long sandspit, and the granite headland of Bodega Head jutting out into the Pacific.
Read the complete Bodega Bay write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Santa Cruz Mountains Flow photo pull-off, about halfway. Next is San Francisco Bay Area return.
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.
Read the complete Near Lodi, on the way back write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
San Francisco Bay Area return sits at 397 km, about halfway. Next is Food stop near Lodi.
Food stop near Lodi is where this day stops to eat. Next is Santa Cruz Mountains Flow checkpoint 8.
South of San Francisco's city limits, the land runs out abruptly. Daly City's houses, the ones with the colourful matching boxes that inspired the song Little Boxes, cover the hills right up to the edge of high, crumbling sea cliffs, and below them the Pacific pounds a long empty beach.
Read the complete Near Daly City write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Santa Cruz Mountains Flow checkpoint 8 closes the day. Next is Back to Santa Cruz.
That is the kind of place where the Bay Area's tech wealth seems very far away, even though Woodside and Portola Valley, home to some of the most expensive real estate in the country, are only a few kilometres down the hill.
Read the complete Santa Cruz write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Back at Back to Santa Cruz. That is the ride.
Food stop near Lodi → Near Daly City is the logistics leg. Watch junctions, villages and speed changes, then let the roadbook do its job: move you out of the clutter without spending your best attention too early.