Lovely ride today: perfect temperatures, although occasional crosswinds had me hurriedly slowing down. My first weekend ride in a while, since the cherry blossom and then tomb-sweeping seasons always make me wary of traffic on the nearby hills. Thanks @Membrillo for recommending the 北8 as an alternate way to get up into the hills: I had that mostly to myself this morning, and thought it was a quiet day out. Plus I’ve still done it few enough times that I keep getting personal records on Strava! Then I was really glad I’d taken that route when I discovered that the 101 was in fact discouragingly busy. But I only had to deal with that for very short sections: everything away from that road was almost deserted.
Kudos to the taxi (!) on my descent of the 101 at the end of the ride: staying a good distance back until they saw the chance to pass, then quickly doing so while keeping a safe distance from me. Negative kudos to the car behind them, who stayed tight just behind and beside me, which meant when a car suddenly started backing out in front of us I had to slam on the brakes to avoid an impact, since I had no way to swing out on the road. The descending car narrowly missed the reversing car, but I don’t think they even noticed.
Cherry blossoms all gone. Saw a few Formosan magpies and eagles. There were three or four other cyclists on the lovely quieter mountain roads, but I saw several big packs of them (us?) on the coast road.
Plenty of surfers not at Baishawan itself, but a little further around the coast. Um … it seemed like way too many in a fairly small area.
Total 57km, with 1033m of elevation gain.
. Wish I had more time to explore them.
.
