Tandem Cycling - First tandem ride

My wife and I only returned to cycling last August and started tandeming about 5 weeks ago. Today marked our first group ride "dominated" by tandems. This was a leisurely 32 mile ride preceded by a club pancake breakfast and punctuated by a long stop at Peet's for coffee. This is the first ride I recall where I didn't look at at my heart monitor once, didn't look at the mileage and only looked at cadence to keep from over-spinning my trusty stoker. Even though there were some singles along (maybe 6 tandems and 6 singles), we didn't have the usual mini-pack of singles at the bottom of a grade killing our momentum prior to a short climb. Made some new friends and explored San Francisco peninsula neighborhoods featuring bike lanes and almost no traffic. This was a great start to our 4th of July! Hope you all did also.

The Grizzly Peak Cyclists are having a 52 mile tandem rally in Sonoma (North of San Francisco) on July 25th which should be a good deal of fun and another opportunity to ride with like kind.

Fellow tandemers are a good way to have a fun ride TWOgether!
Tandem rallies are just bigger. The largest we've attended was years ago, MTR in Des Moines, IA, with 600+ tandem teams.

The Sonoma tandem rally appears to be an expanded club ride, but should attract tandems from other clubs as well. Next year we're definitely going to the NWTR since it's so "close", at least within driving distance.

Was this a club ride? If so what club? I'm from Palo Alto and looking for group tandem rides.
Mick

I hope the July ride can accommodate a newbie couple....we just got a new (used) Santana and only have a few miles of tandem experience under our collective belts, but would love to ride that route and meet other riders.

We are from San Mateo. We ride our tandem on big rides, at least once per week.

We are usually the only tandem, and like to go on fast but small group rides with a cast of good friends, rather than a true "club."

It would be awesome to see more tandems out there.

Scotharr,
I think the ride is 2/TM so there shouldn't be any real climbs and the TM pace is 12-14 mph average which I guess is nominally based on a specific Berkeley-area 18.7 mile loop. I'm sure with a bunch of tandems there will be a range of pace and I wouldn't expect folks to be in a big hurry on what looks to be a very nice ride. Nancy Yu, the ride leader, is going to send me the route sheet once it's ready and I'm going to create a gpx file with elevation: I'll post it here when done. Hope to see you there.