VeloRapters were a top 20 individual contributor with $1,650 in individual donations, plus a $2,500 corporate donation (thank you, Rick P.). The event had 400 participants this year and raised $213,000 for Oakland and Alameda schools.
And there were TWO VELORAPTORS THIS YEAR
The 110-mile ride was under cool weather with 4,761 feet of elevation. The route is pretty going through cow and solar farm country between the Benicia Bridge and Vacaville.
The cool weather turned out to be an asset. The ambience and support on the ride was amazing. I am sore but feeling good today.
Davis Rest Stop included olives, sushi, pickle juice, and chargers for iPhones and iWatches.
Thank you for your generous support. It really makes a difference.
Sincerely,
Rick
Pauline, Chris and Gail show that they can Brighten a Rainy Ride!
We had a wonderful hike planned for April, to enjoy spring flowers and green grass. Unfortunately, the weather did not cooperate. While we always need rain, it brings problems on hike days. Several VeloRaptors looked at the weather forecast and decided to change their plans.
Three hardy folks made of sterner stuff (Gail Y, Karen G and Fiona D) met at the Clyde Woolridge staging area, donned rain gear, and set off down the Jackson Grade. We immediately noticed that the trail was slick underfoot, so Fiona returned to her car to get poles. Appropriately equipped, we continued down to the stone bridge, enjoying the amazing scent of wet vegetation. As we proceeded south on the Brandon Trail, the mud got thicker – the stick to your boots kind of mud. We valiantly pressed on for a while further, when the mud got worse, and we decided that discretion is the better part of valor – the hike would be available in future, but we’d be able to enjoy it better without any broken bones or other injuries. Regardless, it was a nice walk retracing our steps. We had a fun 1.5 mile outing and look forward to doing the full hike later in the year.
Wednesday, April 8: A group of 11 intrepid VeloRaptors headed up Mt Diablo. They started in Walnut Creek, and took an intricate route through the neighborhoods that took them to the south entrance. They then proceeded up the south side and picked up another VeloRaptor at the junction, making a tidy dozen. After enjoying the view from the top they descended the north side, and midway down an agitated rattlesnake added a bit of extra excitement to their day. The first rider to pass the snake must have upset the creature, because it was coiled and ready for those that followed, even striking at one or two! Fortunately, downhill speed was to the riders advantage and no one was snake bit by the experience. Weather was perfect! Thanks to Kathy T. for organizing and leading this fun ride.
A couple of Wednesdays ago, I was cruising down Redwood Road toward Little Pinehurst with a bunch of VeloRaptors on our weekly ride. The road was dry and fast and my heavy bike was sailing along at about 25 mph, and as usual while descending, I felt no resistance when I turned my pedals. But then, starting up Pinehurst I also felt no resistance. Whoops, I thought – I somehow dropped my chain. Having no choice but to stop, I turned my bike over and saw the reason: there was no chain! I literally did drop it. John, one of my cycling buddies, came up behind me and quipped “I think you lost your chain back up the road.” Assuming my ride was over, I tried to call my wife for a ride home, but there was no cell service. My Lyft app didn’t work either.
I figured I’d have a long walk back to Skyline and Joaquim Miller and cruise home downhill. Just then a guy came riding down Pinehurst toward us. “Need anything,” he asked.
“Well, I lost my chain up the road there.”
“I’ll get it,” he said as he sped away up the hill as effortlessly as I had come down it.
I started the long walk home, but when I got to the old fire station, that same rider came toward me and casually commented “I found your chain . . . and I have a chain tool to fix it.” He showed his ‘quicklink’ tool and went to work. His name was Dave and he was riding from Castro Valley. We chatted about the campaign Bike East Bay was supporting to restore a bike lane that politicians were proposing to remove from the city’s bicycle plan. Within a few minutes he removed a broken link from the chain, put the chain back together, and had it back on my bike! “You know, I feel like I’m part of a bicycling community. I can’t thank you enough,” I said.”Well, yes. Your work with Bike East Bay contributes to that community, too. We each bring different skills to our hobby.”I couldn’t have agreed more, but I forgot to get contact info for Dave, so if you see him, let him know the repair worked and I got home safely. I now have a new chain and a heightened respect for the cycling community we share.
Tom Willging
VeloRaptor Cycling Club
Oakland, CA
For the past few years the VeloRaptors have organized a spring get-a-way, 3 days of biking around Paso Robles. This year was no different, and due to the popularity of the trip, we scheduled two groups that went down on successive weeks, March 22-26 and March 30-April 2.
Reports from the first week indicated that the weather was warm and the rides were great. The following week, the weather was a bit cooler – and was also great for biking’
Click to check out the blog post about the trip
SAVE THE DATE – Sunday, April 10 for the 2026 Bike Wash and Dinner:
Place: Home of Randy and Christina Mellin, 181 Shuey Drive in Moraga.
The Bike Wash and Dinner is a fundraiser for BORP (Adaptive Sports and Recreation in the Bay Area, see BORP.org). Each year as part of the BORP Revolution Ride, there is a team fund raising challenge. Last year the VeloRaptors Team took second place in the competition, and we hope to do even better this year!
All funds collected for the bike wash and dinner go to BORP VeloRaptor Team. So, by participating, you contribute to a great organization, get a fun and tasty dinner and get a clean bike. See you there!
The March Monthly Metric to the Greenest Green Ever on Morgan Territory happened in a most disjointed manner. The ride was scheduled for March 18, but ended up being postponed due to an unusual March heat wave. But with our upcoming excursions to Paso Robles, only a few folks ended up doing the ride, and on different days to boot. Here are their comments:
From Phillip G: Kurt and I had a great ride today – moderate temperatures, not much wind or traffic. And very green! Plus a few wildflowers, but not a ton. But, I’m sure it will still be very green for a Wednesday ride.
We found the water at Morgan Territory Staging Area – at the far left corner, next to the bathrooms.
Got a little surprise there – probably 20 or 30(?) Harleys and other big motorcycles in the parking lot, on a fundraising ride for colorectal cancer awareness. Our timing was great – they were heading north, so since our breaks coincided, we completely missed passing them in the opposite direction on the (narrow) road completely. Much safer and quieter!
Then a few days later – Fred M and Dale P did the ride. According to Dale: Fred and I had a gorgeous ride on the Morgan Territory loop Wednesday, and I’m happy to report it’s still as green as ever!!
Question: Would Fred have enough stories to entertain me all the way up the big climb?
Answer: Absolutely!! And then some!!!
The February Monthly metric covered one of the best bike rides in the Bay Area. Starting in Nicasio, the route heads north along the Nicasio reservior and then turns northeast toward Petaluma on Pt. Reyes-Petaluma road where one encounters the first climb. Once over the top, a nice downhill took us to the Nicasio Valley Cheese Factory for a pit stop. A half mile later we took a left on Hicks Valley Road and enjoyed to rolling hills of Marin. Hicks Valley Road ends at a T intersection with Marshall-Petaluma at the western base of Wilson hill – the second climb! This one is no joke, an even 10% grade that seems to never end. Dale and Steve are glad to be on e-bikes!
The descent down Wilson hill is fast and exhilirating! After a couple miles we turned left on Chileno Valley road which is just a great road to bike. It is just one pastoral scene after another for 14 miles and is mostly devoid of cars. We did see a few well behaved ag trucks
Chileno Valley road ends in another T at Tomales-Petaluma Rd and here we took a left turn toward Tomales.
Tomales is known among cyclists as the bakery there makes a great rest-stop. Unfortunately and unbeknownst to the ride leader, the bakery and deli both close on Tuesday and Wednesday during the winter months. But, there was a food truck and between that and the grocery store we made due. Here we are, repleat and ready to head out for Tomales Bay.
The weather during the ride to Tomales was overcast and cool, but the clouds started to dissipate when we reached Tomales Bay where the tide was OUT.
We had a fabulous ride down Route 1 and into Pt. Reyes Station for coffee and pastry at Toby’s, before pedaling back to the start in Nicasio.
Input from Richard Goodman, Larry DiCostanzo and Bill Bagnell
First from Richard:
Fiction
Russell Banks, Magic Kingdom (2022). Since I am drawn to books that take me to times and places new to me, I reveled in this tale of rural Florida in the early 20th century and the Shaker community that first thrived, then struggled there.
Geraldine Brooks, March (2005). This novel reimagines the life of Mr. March (the unseen father in Little Women) as a chaplain during the Civil War. With luminous prose, it shines a light on the wretched lives of the newly released slaves, of the unimaginably horrible front lines and of the grim conditions in Civil War hospitals.
Percival Everett, James (2024). This novel retells the story of Huckleberry Finn from the standpoint of the enslaved Jim (here, called “James”). Although it may be heresy to admit this, I enjoyed James more than Mark Twain’s original, which I reread at the same time!
Bernard Malamud, The Fixer (1967). This novel, which won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1967, is based on the true story of a poor Jew in Tsarist Russia who is accused of the ritual murder of a Russian boy. Difficult to read but impossible to put down.
Gary Shteyngart, Vera, or Faith (2025). This dystopian tale follows a precocious 10 year old girl (Vera) in near-future America. The story, told from Vera’s perspective, follows her attempts to connect with her Korean-American birth mother and to hold together her (very!) blended family as it struggles with rising authoritarianism. Somber yet hilarious!
Wallace Stegner, The Angle of Repose (1971). This Pulitzer Prize–winning novel weaves together the story of a retired historian confined to a wheelchair and the 19th-century frontier lives of his grandparents, whose letters and papers he is studying.
Elizabeth Strout, Olive, Again (2019). This novel, told through interconnected stories, focuses on Olive Kitteridge,
a prickly retired math teacher from Crosby, Maine featured in a previous Strout novel. It spans roughly a decade of Olive’s later life as she navigates aging, loneliness, love, regret, and connection. You can’t go wrong with this or with any of Strout’s novels!
Non–Fiction ——————–
Frances Dinkelspiel, Towers of Gold (2008). This is a biography of the author’s great-great-grandfather, Isaias Hellman, a Jewish immigrant who rose from penniless store clerk to powerful financier in California. It chronicles how Hellman’s financial acumen and investments in industries like banking (including Wells Fargo), transportation, viticulture, and oil played a pivotal role in transforming California from a raw frontier into a modern economy. A terrific read!
Richard Federko, A Walk in the Park (2024). Just how many things can go wrong when you attempt to hike the entire Grand Canyon? More than you can imagine!
Stephen Greenblatt, Dark Renaissance (2025). I had no previous interest in Christopher Marlowe and knew only that he was a contemporary of Shakespeare. My bad! Marlowe’s story, told by a master storyteller, is as fascinating as that of the Bard of Avon!
Patrick McGee, Apple in China (2025). McGee chronicles the background of Apple’s placing all of its bets on China, currently doing 90% of its manufacturing there. It is thereby putting itself at great risk as well as training China’s next generation of engineers, who may go on to develop hostile technology.
Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World (2004). Who knew that New Amsterdam, the Dutch colony that became New York, was the font of American diversity or that a a Dutch-born lawyer named Adriaen van der Donck was the true father of the liberties we cherish?
Ian Tattersall, Masters of the Planet: The Search for Our Human Origins (2012). This book explores how Homo Sapiens became the dominant species on Earth, focusing on the unique traits that allowed us to outcompete other human species, such as Neanderthals.
Amanda Vaill, Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution (2025). Having revered Ron Chernow’s Hamilton in 2016, I wondered what more there was to say about this man and his family. Much, much more, it turns out, especially when the focus is on his wife and sister-in-law!
Irvin Yalom, Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist’s Memoir (2017). Yalom arose from an impoverished immigrant home to become a foremost modern psychotherapist, writing numerous books along the way (I read three of his other books this year, as well as this one!)
My very favorite books this year were:
Fiction – Brooks, Geraldine, March (2005).
Non-Fiction – Stephen Greenblatt, Dark Renaissance (2025).
Happy New Year and happy reading to all of you!
Now from Larry DiCostanzo:
My friend, Richard Goodman, has inspired me yet again to send out my list of favorite books of 2025. The fact is that I didn’t get time to read a lot, given how our year was one of medical extravaganzas. I think I did “comfort reading” — old favorites, a book I read as a child, and some books about the medieval world. Everything on the list is fiction. Larry
Here you go:
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Once again I’ve read this great murder mystery that, like many modern mystery movies, closes with a trial. The eponymous brothers and many others are portrayed as unique individuals with intense interactions and flights of individualism. The contrasts are great and wonderful: for example, a very serious scene followed by the most beautiful description of a happy dog in love with his young master.
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen: It always pays to reread a good book and shake off one’s bias. This time, I finally realized that both the pride and the prejudice were the traits of the heroine Elizabeth Bennett and that Mr. Darcy is, in fact, the good guy. This is a delightfully complicated book with insights into how law and society influence character. P.s. Did you know this is the 250th anniversary of Miss Austen’s birth? That by happenstance I came across her grave in Winchester Cathedral?
Paradise Lost by John Milton: I am not quite sure if Mr. Milton “justified the ways of God to Man” as he had hoped. But he was certainly valiant. Plus he wrote a hard-to-read (for us) but verbally exciting story that is like super science fiction in many respects (think battles in space), fantasy in others (think evil guys holding conferences) and an excellent retelling of the story of Adam and Eve as people who don’t really have much experience and certainly don’t have a past. Not for the faint hearted.
The Heat of the Day and The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen: Miss Bowen is an Anglo-Irish woman who wrote from the 1930s through about 1960. The first book is a World War Two story in which a widowed English woman with a son in the army has to worry about whether her English lover is actually a mole or agent for Germany. The second book is pre-war and concerns how a young person loses trust because of one single event: An adult exercises thoughtless privilege to read her diary without permission. Bowen is a serious writer and, I think, an amazing stylist.
The Pickup by Nadine Gordimer: In this relatively short book, Nadine Gordimer tells the story of a privileged young South African woman who meets a car mechanic who is an illegal alien with high intelligence, dissatisfactions, and hopes. He is caught out, they marry, and must move to his unnamed Islamic desert country. Conflict arises as she discovers she is content there, and he is always seeking escape. This is a beautiful book.
Grettir’s Saga by Anonymous: This book is one of the many Icelandic sagas written down in the 13th century, but harking back to earlier Viking times. These sagas are actually novels. This one is about the obsessively individualistic Grettir and how his asocial attitude leads to the disaffection of his fellows, to his isolation, and friendlessness. Believe me, friendlessness in medieval Iceland in no joke. The scenery and the way of life are well portrayed — indeed, so well that the editors add maps showing Grettir’s travels. If you think such early Viking age literature might be hard to get into, think again please.
River of Stars by Guy Gavriel Kay: This is a fantastic, rip-roaring book about a fantasy China under siege from steppe barbarians to the north. It is a great companion to “Under Heaven” also about fantasy China, and which I wrote about in an earlier list. Here there is poetry, sad ruin, cynical governance, savagery, a young man who rises from the bottom, unmerited failures and successes, and struggles between noble aspirations and loyalty. This is a page-turner.
Laurus by Eugene Vodolazkin: The high quality of the literature coming out of modern Russia is amazing. “Laurus”, set in the 1400s, is the fictional biography of a “holy fool”, a character that appears elsewhere in Russian art, for example, in Moussorgsky’s opera “Boris Godunov” or perhaps in Dostoyevsky’s “The Idiot”. This is a beautiful book with macro- and micro-landscapes (think forest and different kinds of moss and fungus), magic moments as in hagiography and a consistent narrative of a man whose whole life is determined by a youthful act of selfishness.
The Wheel on the School by Meindert DeJong: I must have read this book (about 300 pages) when it won the Newbury Medal in 1955. The teacher in a small school in a “stork-less” village in Friesland turns the kids loose to complete a project which is also a dream — to find a wagon wheel to put on top of the school for storks to nest on. The children have wonderful experiences as they forage. And I have never read a book in which the meeting of the world of children with the separate world of adults is so well done. There are great people like the legless fisherman and great visuals like the tinker’s horse wagon. Excellent values in a real world. Illustrations by a young Maurice Sendak.
Bill Bagnell’s List
I read the first three books in high school but may not read the others. For some reason that I don’t fully understand, I can’t seem to get into fiction these days, all I read is non-fiction. Here are a few to try:
Sexuality in Medieval Europe by Karras and Pierpont (I was curious);
The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes (a bit technical but a wonderfully written story about how basic research and brilliant people led to a massive WW2 effort to create a most terrible weapon);
The Death of Meyerhold by Mark Jackson (local playwright Jackson wrote this years ago for Shotgun Players, who are reviving it in a new production at the end of 2026. Script is available on Amazon, play will be a must-see, and sometimes reading a script in advance of seeing the production can enhance the experience).
Bill Bagnell
Life is a strange attractor
Gods are the tapeworms of the mind