Shoot the Pass Shots

Here are a few shots from my weekend's travels with about 100 of my closest friends. Well actually, I only knew a few of the people from 'Sno Jokes, a Seattle ski club, who put on an annual bicycling tour of Washington's wine country. This was the first one for me, but probably won't be the last.

One of the fixtures of the event is Jim Gayther, the proud owner of a Cadillac hearse, a Cadillac ambulance, and a Cadillac trailer, all mauve. His job was to haul a bunch of people and bicycles up to White Pass, the summit on Highway 12. From there, we rode about 15 mostly downhill miles to lunch at the Trout Lake Lodge. From there, it was another 15 mostly flat miles to Naches. Most of us loaded up our bicycles at the Lodge and drove the rest of the way to Prosser. There were a few hard core bikers who biked the 110 miles to Prosser, but I wasn't one of them.

We spent a couple of nights in Prosser, covering about 25 miles and a half dozen wineries(and one micro brewery YEAH!!) on Saturday. On Sunday, we loaded up and drove to Zilla for another four or five wineries and maybe 15 miles of bicycling in a light rain.

Here's Gail, the hard-core biker, leading the pack as usual. She was one of the iron butts who biked the whole route from White Pass to Prosser.

Here's some of the crowd at a lunch stop. I don't think the whole group was ever in one place at one time, so I don't have a shot of the whole bunch of us. My retro-cruiser bike was the only one of its kind in the crowd, and attracted a lot of attention. Every one else had zillion speed road bikes or mountain bikes. Even though many in the crowd wore their dorky biker gear (where do they think they are, on the Tour de France?), they were a pretty good group. The biggest laughs I got out of the dorky biker gear are the riding shorts. Apparently these padded shorts are great at protecting the nether regions while biking, and lord knows I could have used a little extra padding, but if the shorts weren't pulled up tight while off the bike, the sagging padding made the wearers looked like kids in diapers with a load on. 

Anyway, it was a fun trip, and not counting the two cases of wine I bought, it was relatively cheap.