Bicycle Pilgrimmage

This past weekend I went on a long bicycle ride, the Buddhist Bicycle Pilgrimmage which is a 150 mile bicycle ride that visits 3 spiritual centers in Northern California: Spirit Rock Meditation Center, City of 10000 Buddhas and Abhayagiri Monastery. After the ride, we realized that this whole section of northern California is filled with spiritual retreat areas - a few Christian retreat centers were outside of Occidental, and Mt Tabor, an Eastern Orthodox hermitage, shares the same mountain as Abhayagiri, just to name the ones which were along the route. A pilgrimmage that visits all the potential spiritual and religious sites would have an awful lot of stops!

In any case, we began the trip on Saturday morning with a short talk about exercising mindfulness, compassion and mutual responsibility as we rode on the pilgrimmage. Tan Karunadamo, a guest monk at Abhayagiri, and a meditation instructor (who's name I confess to forgetting) gave the talk and launched us on our way. I should point out in advance that my camera has an uncanny tendency to focus on Buddha images in the background instead of the people in foreground. Sorry for any focus errors! (maybe it's a Buddhist camera?)

My riding partner was Laitheng, a very dear and charming friend who was a constantly cheerful and enthusiastic companion on the whole ride. The only thing that could distract her from riding happily along, was the prospect of tasty vegan pastries...




















We passed a row of cows chowing down that morning - I suspect their meal wasn't vegan pastries, but they didn't seem to be complaining...

The morning passed relatively quickly - we had been told around the 30 mile mark that we had passed through all the tough hills for the day - what a relief that was! Until we started the ascent to the mid-point checkin, at the 50 mile mark in Occidental. Occidental is at the top of a long uphill ride through a forest lined road. It was a wonderful ride (and the ride down into Guernville was spectacular!). But it was still a seemingly serious uphill - don't these Buddhist types know that lying is a precept violation!?

In any case, our friend Loc caught up with us in Occidental and we all had a delicious lunch at Howard's Cafe. They had a nice selection of delicious veggie sandwiches, as well as vegan pastries (welcome to northern california!).


The next 50 miles that day passed very quickly - the ride down from Occidental was fast and fun, coursing through the shady road into Sonoma. We were aiming to get into the campground before 6pm, so that we could clean up, setup the tents and have dinner. Along the way we caught up with two of our friends on the ride, Jason and Megan, and then eventually Annie who had suffered a flat tire a mere 2 miles from the campground! We stopped for maybe half an hour to try and change the tube, but Annie's new ride had totally new tires that were impossible for newbies like us to remount. Eventually we left Annie in the hands of the more experienced support team and made the final ascent into the KOA campgrounds. Just before the final hill to the campground, I tried some of the highly caffeinated "Gu" sports goop which was being handed out. I can't tell if it helped my performance or not, but I must say I prefer my espresso in liquid form (not in slime form).

The evening passed fairly quickly - sadly I had misconfigured my alarm (accidentally setting it to go off at 5:50pm instead of 5:50am) and missed the morning meditation, but Franklyn, the de facto captain of our riding group, made sure we woke up in time for breakfast! Yay Franklyn!

We staggered to breakfast - looking at the photos, it is clear that for the riders, it was a "the morning after" or maybe even a "coyote morning".







But Suzanna and Valerie looked fresh and happy (and even a little stylish!).

Perhaps because they didn't have to ride 95 miles the day before??!

But we were grateful for all their cheerful help as part of the support crew. The three amigos above would look a lot more bedraggled without our wonderful support crew to feed and keep an eye out for us!

Because there was a special lunch being prepared for us at City of 10,000 Buddhas (CTTB) it was important that we arrive there on time. We made good time, despite relatively windy conditions. Along the way about 14 of the riders got into a drafting line, which bumped our average speed from 14 mph to maybe 18mph. We covered a lot of ground pretty quickly, but like all phenomena, it proved to be impermanent and dissolved about 5 miles before CTTB. Still, it gave us a needed boost and we got to lunch on time!









At CTTB, I took this photo of Franklyn, the de facto leader of our merry band of Berkeley Pilgrims. He looks like the Rivendell Bicycles poster boy. And I kid you not, he was saying "Grant" as I took this photo.
But in all honesty, I asked him to say Grant. And his bike is very nice...but wait, are those clipless pedals...?






Lunch was at CTTB, which was prepared by the Jin Kong restaurant at the monastery. Jin Kong prepares delicious vegetarian food that uses no garlic, onions or eggs. Essentially these are meals that do not involve the suffering of animals, and many of the plants are grown organically in order to preserve the environment. Surprisingly (for some people), the food is also delicious - demonstrating that you don't have to be a culinary martyr in order to eat foods that follow Buddhist precepts. After the meal, Heng Sure and Tan Karunadamo gave a brief talk and led the bicycle pilgrims on a tour of the main Buddha Hall.

After lunch, we departed for the final 20 mile stretch of the 150 mile bike ride. We left CTTB with Valerie to ride for Abhayagiri. Valerie's bike was a relatively heavy bike with front suspension fork, seatpost suspension and big, lumpy, slow wheels. The difference between her bike and our relatively lean and fast bikes was plain to see. It was hard for her to maintain the average speed of 10mph that we needed to sustain in order to make it to Abhayagiri in time for the closing ceremonies. After riding with her as long as we could, we made a dash for monastery and arrived in time to sign in and grab some snacks before the final ceremony!

Over 150 miles completed in 2 days of riding. We had been lucky to have all the training rides in the weeks before to build up not just our stamina and climbing ability, but also our bike handling skills. Along the way we spent lots of time looking out for each other, helping each other out on bike repair and upgrade projects and in general fostering the bonds that make a community - both among my local band of Berkeley bike pilgrims as well as the broader community that rides in the Bicycle Pilgrimmage.

The mailing list for the training rides is still live, and it sounds like people plan on continuing to ride in groups locally. They won't be formal training rides, but will probably just be non-competitive group rides to spend time outdoors in pleasant company. If you're interested, please see the Dharma Wheels website.

Here's a photo of our Berkeley crew of bicycle pilgrims along with some friends from the CTTB community: Franklyn, Megan, Jason, Minty, Steve Lin, Annie, Loc, Laitheng, myself and Valerie. Everyone had a great time, and we're all planning on doing it again next year!