Hello and welcome to King of the Ride podcast episode 171.

As the calendar now reads February, we're into bike racing season.

The World Tour has kicked off with Tour Down Under and the Allulah Tour.

Gravel is coming out of hibernation with rattle gravel in Australia, and I'm lucky enough to have

not one but two races under my belt already. So over the course of one week, I just got back from

the kickoff grasshopper adventure series. Low Gap was the name of it in particular, up in

Northern California, Yucaya in the Mendocino County, to be exact.

A respectable start to the year, given we've been experiencing a frighteningly cold winter here in Vermont so far.

And then rode a five-day coast ride, San Francisco to Los Angeles with a handful of friends,

capping the trip off with the L.A.

tourist race. Now, both events are absolutely awesome. The grasshopper and the L.A. tourist race.

The coast ride was great, too. And call me hyperbolic. But I think the L.A. tourist race is the most

fun event I've ever done. It's certainly going to be on the podium. In short, it is a wild scavenger hunt

that takes you all over the San Gabriel Mountains just north of Los Angeles. It was some

harrowing riding as you're navigating cliffs on single track. It's pristine paved roads. It's

riding through the city. It's a mountain bike double track. It's kind of like roads. It's riding through the city.

It's a mountain bike double track.

It's kind of like an alley cat race meets a gravel race, meets a mountain bike race, meets geocaching.

In fact, I made a movie about it, a moment about my entire trip in California.

So check out the show notes, which summarizes my little January getaway.

I think you'll like it.

And more to the point. As it pertains to this episode, it was on this most recent trip to California that I had time to sit down face-to-face, my favorite type of podcasting, with Pete Stetna

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