Most Christmas days I end up home with the family; often the weather is kind of iffy which helps with the “day off” mentality. But this year, we’d gotten all the present stuff done fairly early, and my wife had enough of a handle on dinner that she took a two hour afternoon nap and that just seemed like the perfect opportunity for an easy ride.

Nothing more than an extension of “the loop”, just tipping my toe into Los Altos. Easy pace, stopping here and there for no good reason at all.

And did see the most amazing, largest mushroom colony ever! On Mountain Home Road in Woodside, between the road and the fencing on the west side. I’m including two photos of it, with the picture of the smaller mushrooms, which are “normal” size, giving an idea of just how massive the big ones are.
<div class=”strava-embed-placeholder” data-embed-type=”activity” data-embed-id=”8291212871″></div><script src=”https://strava-embeds.com/embed.js”></script>

I’ll back up a bit and talk about Tuesday and Thursday’s rides. Both about the same, dreadfully slow, 41 minutes up Kings, no time to do the West Old LaHonda loop. Dreadfully cold too; under 40F the entire ride (my computer reads temps a bit “optimistically though and shows just a bit higher). Tuesday I was on my own; Thursday I had Kevin (ex-pilot) with me. Kevin had stated his intentions to start 5-7 minutes ahead of me, because he thought he’d be slowing me down too much. Had to talk him out of that, and glad I did! 41 minutes was just about right for each of us. And on Thursday, I wasn’t sure how I’d be doing after getting, maybe, 2.5 hours sleep. Surprisingly the sleep didn’t affect me all that much.

Why wasn’t younger Kevin with me? He’d tested positive for Covid last Sunday, probably after already having had it for several days, and finally tested clear Thursday. Not in time to ride Thursday morning though.

But today things were good. Both Kevin (younger Kevin) and I were healthy (despite a couple days of Covid+ readings for me; I didn’t bother to waste a test today, but will see what I look like tomorrow), and I think both of us got enough sleep last night. Cold? Oh yeah. Thank goodness for my electrically-warmed gloves!!! Which almost weren’t available; I woke up at 6:30am and realized hey, did I plug the batteries in after Thursday’s ride? So I got out of bed and went downstairs to where the gloves are, and, sure enough, I had not charged them. Plugged them in and thankfully they were fully-charged by the time we left around 11am.

3 weeks out from a serious ride, heading to the coast wasn’t really an option. Besides, since I’m still likely Covid positive, it’s not like I can head into a place to get food. I tried to convince Kevin that we should do a reverse West Alpine, but he wanted to stay on our side of the hill, and suggested just a foothill loop. Not enough miles for me, and I wanted to see if I could get up Old LaHonda at a bit better clip than the two recent climbs up Kings.

27-something was actually better than I expected up Old LaHonda. At the top we headed south on Skyline, down Page Mil and then south again to Los Altos, stopped for coffee and food at Peets (adjacent to our former shop location) and then headed back on Foothill. We did surprisingly well, and now actually looking forward to the next ride up Kings. I just might survive!