Northern California - San Fransisco & Sonoma Area Bike Ride

My wife is running the Nike Womens half marathon on Oct 19in San Fransisco. We will be arriving Wed Oct 15th and were thinking about going up to the Sonoma/Healdsburg area for a couple of days before settling into our hotel on Friday.

An organized tour would be OK, but certainly not required. I looked at some the the wine tour rides, but we are more interested in riding than wine tasting.

Does anybody have suggestions on where to stay, where to rent rode bikes and where to ride.

Thanks

Wine Country Bikes and Spoke Folk Cyclrey(sp) both rent bikes in Healdsburg. Lots of nice flat to rolling wine touring in the area. Lots of serious hills if you insist. If you want someone to do all the worrying Getawayadventures.com is a bike-hike-kayak-MTB company I occasionally guide for. Go to SRCC.com (Santa Rosa Cycling Club) for lots of local routes and several public club rides a week.

Starting in downtown Healdsburg will give you several options. For example, if you want to do a mostly flat ride, you can head east toward Calistoga. If you want to climb, you can go north and do the Geysers. Another mostly flat ride would involve going south for a bit, then west out to the coastline.

How many miles are you thinking about riding, and what kind of terrain do you want to do?

Starting in downtown Healdsburg will give you several options. For example, if you want to do a mostly flat ride, you can head east toward Calistoga. If you want to climb, you can go north and do the Geysers. Another mostly flat ride would involve going south for a bit, then west out to the coastline.

How many miles are you thinking about riding, and what kind of terrain do you want to do?

I used to work at the Geysers. Have they improved the road? I remember the bottom was pretty good but after that the road was terrible.

Thanks for responding. We have rented some Specialized Roubiax's from the Spoke Folk Cyclery.

We will be trying a couple of differant routes out of Healdsburg. Probably do the coast route one day then try something else the next day. We have all day on Thursday to bike, so we can bump the mileage up. We will probably make Friday a shorter day, maybe 40-50 miles.

The Tour d Organics rides starting from Sebastopol are pretty nice. I've done the 35 and the 100 milers. Not too tough, pretty scenery (though not a lot of places to stock up on water etc.)

http://www.tourdorganics.com/content/view/66/111/