Today, Sunday, we rented three mountain bikes and headed off for a first ride in the close foothills. Three? Yes, I forgot to tell you that Severin is staying with us for a couple of days. Severin studies (or studied) computer science with me at ETH. He just started a six month internship at Stanford. As I said, we rented three great, professional looking, full suspension mountain bikes from the bike store next door. With only little difficulty we managed to load all three bikes into our car. And off we were.
After approximately 40 minutes of driving on windy, very swiss mountain-road reminding, full of crazy, dangerous race bikers road we arrived at Windy Hill Open Space. That’s a natural park open to pedestrians, horses and bikes on some trails. After a very short glimpse at the map we were on our bikes hitting the pedals. After roughly 20 minutes of steep decent we started to wonder if we should go back up before losing all the energy and motivation required to climb up the 270 meters of incline. So we went back up to the car.
Since we weren’t worn out yet after the steep way back up to the car, we stacked the three bikes back into the trunk and drove to another spot called Russian Ridge. This time we (tried to) read the map more carefully to find a nice loop with decent slopes. The scenery at that second spot was gorgeous. The views were just fabulous. This second trail was much better than the first one, although we still managed to reach a dead end and were obliged to retrace our steps 
If you are still reading, you might also spend some time looking at the actual route on Google Maps here.
After that first mountain bike ride we all were quite dead, but Amanda, Severin an I all loved it very much. You are likely to here more about mountain biking in California in the future . On the way home we stopped for a little treat at the local Jamba Juice.
