“Third annual” foraging-themed Northern California bike tour
March 2025
Sunday, 8:30 pm: pouring rain in the parking lot of a strip mall in Santa Rosa, sitting in the steamed-up cab of a ‘98 Tacoma, tearing apart burritos.
Saturday, 11 pm: an empty campground on the Sonoma coast, making paella over the campfire, the smell of rain and redwood and wood smoke, the paella full of foraged mussels, nettles, wild onions, fennel, and miner’s lettuce, store-bought onions and garlic and olive oil and tomatoes, fancy paella rice from the Catalan restaurant in Palo Alto, all cooked to crispy with an entire jar of saffron infused into Trader Joe’s canned wine.
Sunday, 8:30 pm: Back to the truck. Burrito oozing with sour cream and carne asada and guac and cheese. Calling a colleague: “Patrick! Can you bring pants for me to work tomorrow?? I’m in Santa Rosa.”
“You got it,” he said, without missing a beat. No questions asked.
Monday, 7 am: a dozen commuter bikes on the bike car, plus mine, bag after bag bungee-corded together like tumor growths, a paella pan strapped to the side, soaking wet sneakers dangling from a loop, everything still layered in mud, giant hole in the crotch of my pants.
Third annual foraging-themed bike tour was a success!
L. and I wanted to do another bike tour, and the only weekend our schedules aligned was the weekend an atmospheric river was soaking Northern California. Saturday was dry. Sunday it rained the entirety of our ride back.
No luck foraging for mushrooms. It’s late season, and it’s been a dry winter (ironically, given the weather this weekend). I wanted to get some seaweed for the paella, too, but there weren’t any good options where we stopped. The tide was high enough that just getting the mussels was a challenge (or, really, the beginnings of an accident report, given how soaked by the scary waves I got).
Two flat tires. One we changed on the concrete floor of a park bathroom (the only place sheltered from the rain on Sunday morning). I slept in my hammock, and used my hammock rain fly for only the third time since I bought it in 2017. It’s better than being in a tent in the rain—you’re elevated, off the wet ground! We bought a kids’ activity book about salmon from the visitor’s center at the coast and played a ridiculous salmon game and shared salmon facts while cooking the paella. We made tea with a mixture of fresh redwood tips and my home-grown/-dried mint.
Sunday we got soaked. We stopped every two hours for hot drinks. The final stop was at a winery. Our plan was to be ironic, and show up at some pretentious wine tasting covered in mud and soaking wet. But the winery we went to—chosen solely on the basis of it being the nearest and everything about to close—was perfect and beautiful. We took a tiny side road with a hill so steep we had to walk our bikes, and stumbled into the house of this elegant, calm, quiet, white-hair-in-a-bun 80-year-old woman. Her son now runs the winery, but she and her husband bought it and planted the vines 40 years ago… having moved out there from Ithaca. She and her husband both did undergrad at Cornell in he 1960s. He was in the architecture school. After Cornell she helped run a restaurant (“it wasn’t Moosewood, but it was the same idea”) in Trumansburg, in one of the buildings that my cousin’s husband now owns. We talked at length about Ithaca and about Cornell. Her husband had designed the house, which was full of natural light, the same gray moody light as outdoors, but without the rain. There was a fire going on the fireplace. She was so concerned about us biking in the rain that she tried to make us stay overnight, or at least let her drive us back to Santa Rosa. She added a couple extra old wine barrel staves to the fire and we steamed off as we tasted her wines.
Saturday night, post-paella, we didn’t get to bed until almost 1 AM. Basically like staying up night by the standards of being outdoors. I’m pretty sure I’ve never stayed up that late camping. We both thought it was 11—we got to the campground right as it was getting dark, around 7, and then looked for mushrooms, and then the paella takes a while to cook, and then we sat around drinking tea and hot chocolate, and playing the ridiculous salmon games—and so we were astonished when we saw how late it was.
L. didn’t even pretend to be worried about the weather beforehand. (“She never cancels,” is what another one of her outdoor partners told me.) She’s based in the Bay Area, more or less, but both her and her partner work remote, so they travel a lot. (They’re about to take off for three months in Innsbruck.) She’s a serious climber (way, way stronger than me), but tore her ACL a year ago, so has been doing a lot of biking as rehab. She’s an ex-Dead Houses (my co-op compound) person, with a Ph.D. from Stanford, who now works doing AI stuff for a biotech startup (a high-profile one that’s always making headlines for their attempt to “de-extinct” the woolly mammoth, among other species).
We saw a bald eagle! But that was the only exciting animal. Lots of deer, lots of sea lions hauled up, cows and horses and chickens on the farms, et cetera, a few herons.
Our route went from Santa Rosa through the vineyards, down the Russian River through the redwoods, up the coast on the 1 to Salt Point. The Northern California climate triple crown: vineyards and agriculture, river valleys and deep redwood canyons, rocky coastline. In winter the vineyards are stakes and dead trunks, sticking up like a latticework of normal vectors. “Manifold Wines” should be my vineyard. The rain made the redwoods feel intimate and cozy—Pacific Northwestern—with the trees giving shelter, or at least a diffuse barrier, between us and the weather. But it made the coast more austere and frightening—the 1 up there on the bluff, a 500 foot drop down to crashing waves on one side, an unstable rock cut wanting to landslide on the other side, as you’re riding through the storm, uphill, with a headwind, 30 pounds of paella paraphernalia in your panniers.
