Orange County, California, USA.


Rides from the house. Road gives many, many options in all directions, though one does hit the Pacific Ocean after about 15 miles when going south. We can do 100+ mile rides in point to point or loop fashion and many shorter variations of the loops. Never bored. OC proper is short on good long climbs, but we can always manage to get good climbing is the ride is planned for that. Mountain rides from the house have more limited options, unless one throws in 6-8 miles of pavement. None the less, we have great and varied MTB options right from the driveway.


If we want to drive to a ride, and we do probably 30-40% of the time. It opens up virtually endless options, even if we limit the drive to 30-45 minutes. Mountains, beach-road or MTB. We can go share in the Los Angeles County or San Diego County goodness, not to much the stuff in Riverside and San Bernardino County mountains-big stuff...watch the Tour of California when it gets to So Cal.


The train also opens up stuff farther north, without the pain of traffic. Because as wonderful as the options are in So Cal, one cannot overlook the hideous traffic. I'm currently waiting for traffic to thin out so that the 72 mile drive to my project site takes less than 2.5 hours. Hoping for under 1.5 hours by leaving at 10:30 AM.

You don't even have to be a Strava member to use their global heat map. I've been using it for years. I only joined Strava because I started riding roads that don't appear on their map, and those are the only rides I send them data for.

OP - do you want to ride from where you sleep, or is a drive OK?

Also - define an acceptable route for you.

It's been stable / unchanged for a few years. They haven't added many new features, and they still use the same 2015 ride data.

I like their Route Builder, which probably needs a free strava login. I do check the routes using google maps satellite view (or Street View if available). Mountain biker's gravel roads and trail rides are included in the heat map. I reviewed the Route Builder in this post.

I ride way more new routes since I got GPS navigation.

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But who needs maps and routes?
All you need is an 11 km loop to ride. Just ask Amanda Coker!

It would take me well over a year just to ride the saved routes on Ridewithgps

that start from my door. Many have few or no mandatory stops.

Southern Wisconsin is great, because unlike most other neighboring states, the farm roads were all paved years ago. Most of those have held up reasonably well.


Minnesotans are envious of our paved farm roads.

My riding area is Rhode Island (there are bigger icebergs in antarctica) and southern, and coastal Massachusetts as far as Cape Cod and a few rides extend into Connecticut. The main cities in the area are Providence and Boston but in between are many residential areas and country roads. The country roads generally have light traffic and motorists are considerate, It is generally flat so if you want climbing practice you have to look for it. The further north and west we go, the hillier. Sometimes much hillier. From home, I can put together rides of a century or more. Our bike club has downloadable maps of most rides and number 50 or more. Narragansett Bay Wheelmen My favorite rides take me to the shore of the Sakonett River or Buzzards Bay or past horse farms.

I don't have enough routes on road, honestly. That is my one problem living in Boise vs the East Bay Area in CA, back there I always had something a little different from my last few rides, and was never bored of any of them. I am discovering some new stuff here, but a lot of the roads are old farm roads with no bikes lanes. That said, the MTB options here kick the crap out of the boring fireroads I was near in CA, and I haven't hit a significant portion of what is available. Overall, I can still get a good ride in from my front door on road/gravel, plus I have way more MTB, so I think it is a net positive. But man, I really miss the Berkeley hills and Mt Diablo.

I live in Northern California. I expect that I will never run out of new routes.

The North Cascades Highway opens tomorrow.

I DO NOT NEED different routes, different scenery, mountains that challenge in order to enjoy a good day's worth of bicycling. A friend I ride with is constantly pointing things out as we ride because he loves to look around while I'm a "nose to the stem" type of rider.

I have this area..... that suits me just fine. 175+ miles in July for my birthday ride starting at midnight.

Obviously the longer a trip is, the more possibilities open up. Where I live in the Westchester (NYC northern suburbs) there aren't that many nice routes to and from my home to where it opens up about 8 miles out. However, I can ride a hundred mile loop every weekend and never repeat a loop (except for the first and last miles). That's one advantage of living in an area that was developed in the horse and buggy era, and where the nature of the landscape itself limits excess development.

One of the interesting things is that you can ride the same stretch of road and it'll be different depending on the direction and the seasons.

Some roads seem completely different if ridden in the opposite direction. In some cases a favorite route will be miserable based on terrain or traffic patterns.

So, for your situation, consider trying a route backward. Then do a Fall ride in the Spring. You'll be surprised that your limited options don't seem as limited.

The other option is to swallow your pride, and load the bikes in a car to start rides farther from home, That will open new vistas to explore. I do something similar, but it's easier because I can take the bike on a train, and start my ride 40-50 miles out.

Quote:

Originally Posted by FBinNY

…One of the interesting things is that you can ride the same stretch of road and it'll be different depending on the direction and the seasons.

Some roads seem completely different if ridden in the opposite direction. In some cases a favorite route will be miserable based on terrain or traffic patterns.

So, for your situation, consider trying a route backward. Then do a Fall ridein the Spring. You'll be surprised that your limited options don't seem as limited…

Last week I post about making rides more novel:

Most days I get about one hour for cycling, whenever the work day ends. I suppose I could drive somewhere half-an-hour a way, take the bike off the rack, put it back, and drive home ...

Forward and backward. That's two days. Only 363 to go.

If my boss would jst respond I might get out early today and actually ride a route I haven't had the time/energy to tackle in a few months.

There's a limit to the variety possible in a one hour ride starting in the same place. However the OP rides much longer distances, so the possibilities are greater.

In your case, it might be possible to bring the bike to work with you in the car (assuming you do drive in), then drive out to a nice area to ride on your way home. Starting from work waves you whatever the transit time home is, and may offer options for longer rides, at least these months with longer daylight hours.

I'm not saying this will work for you, just that we all have to do what works for us, but can sometimes create options with some creative thinking.

Like [MENTION=423651]Maelochs[/MENTION], I can't go out and cover new and interesting miles after work. So I go out on weekends for that.

I try to ride on routes with the speed limit at or below 35mph. Sometimes 45mph or 55mph are unavoidable.

I'd like to ride from where I live ... but we usually drive to the start of our rides.

An acceptable route?

-- road with minimal gravel
-- not too much climbing. I'll tackle 1.5 routes now, and occasionally more, but if I'm after a fairly relaxed ride, I like them to be 1 and below.

I guess you'll have to move. If not off Tasmania entirely, at least out of Hobart.

Actually, if you were to drive out to Campbelltown, it looks there may be some decent loops to try.

I know you both work, so your have to be realistic about schedules, but maybe try to do 2-3 day weekend rides, so you can get farther out, and away from your hilly local terrain.

Yes, there's quite a bit of cycling out of Campbell Town ... 150 km away.

We run our events out of a town a little further north than that, but use Campbell Town as one of our controls. In fact, our Easter Adventure set, the "Campbell Town Canter" did just that and we rode both the 300K and 200K as well as hosting/supporting a 300K in between.

As I mentioned, we get up north on average about every 6 weeks or so ... pretty much every long weekend and then a few extra weekends thrown in. Because we're hosting a Super Randonneur series (200K, 300K, 400K, and 600K) + a Nouveau Series (50K, 100K, 160K) + the Fleche all up in that area, we've had to go up there quite frequently to check routes.

However, on weekends when we're not travelling up there we'd like to keep the driving to a minimum ... preferably under half an hour each way if possible.

Given that I'm exploring by wire from 10,000 mile away, it's going to be rough to offer any specifics.

However, you're in an area with pronounced ridges and valleys, so I suspect that it'll be hard to make a variety of loops without some serious climbs.

The only thing I have is to try to find a friendly B&B or simple hotel someplace up north to use as a base of operations. Drive out Friday night, do loops for 2 days, then drive home Sunday evening. That's the idea, the details, like location and scheduling are your job.

I've been doing more and more of my riding on Fiesta Island. It's boring, but safe and controlled, which I like.

For long rides I venture out of course - wouldn't be able to handle it for that long. I've bracketed up to 30 min before and/or after a group ride on Fiesta Island just to get more miles.

I have about 6 routes/rides that I do most frequently, 2 of them being local MTB trails.

Between road racing and MTB riding I find myself doing "destination" type rides that require travel a few times per month.

That's what we do on just about every long weekend and the occasional regular weekend.

It's too much hassle to do it more than that. For one thing, they're doing major construction on the Midlands Hwy which runs up the middle of Tasmania between Hobart and Launceston and so they've reduced the speed limit for a large portion of the state's main highway to about 60 km/h. A trip that should take about 2 hours each way takes us 3 or more hours each way now. It has been like that for almost a year now, and doesn't look like they're in any particular hurry to finish it.

It's also expensive. We stay in the least expensive places we can find (caravan parks), but can still easily rack up a $500+ weekend.



I'm not looking for specifics for my area ... I know what's here and have cycled just about all of it. I'm just curious what others have in their area. I came from Manitoba, Alberta, and Victoria Australia where I seemed to have a lot more variety ... but maybe that much variety is unusual. Maybe I got spoiled.

Cool! Thanks!

And it does seem to accurately reflect the most travelled routes around here. And many of those contributions would have been from the gravel grinder crowd.

Just had a closer look and a lot of the contributions there are from the mountain biking community ... there are several places where there are the blue heat map lines, but no roads. I do suspect, however, that there's single track or other mountain bike type trails in those areas.

One thing that's interesting is how popular the Mount Wellington climb seems to be. Rowan and I have done it twice and Rowan has done it an additional 3 times when he lived here a number of years ago.