Bike leaning on a bridge — Bike on a bridge outside of Cottonwood

We are spending this week in Cottonwood visiting my father-in-law for the holidays. I brought along my gravel bike which is my road bike as well. There are a lot of flat or flattish roads that aren’t heavily traveled around where he lives and today he took me out to an old cemetery to start today’s ride.

It is a very small cemetery, with only a few plots visible; I didn’t walk in the gate, just took a couple of photos from the road. It was very cold down there, with the tulle fog in full force, so I then took off up the hill toward the next cemetery.

Over the years we have driven to Cottonwood and I’ve seen the sign for the Northern California Veteran’s Cemetery and I’ve been curious about it. So I road out to it and took a little tour around on my bike. By the time I was up there the sun was out and it was a gorgeous day.

From that cemetery I road back to close to where I started and took a loop called Lower Gas Point Road. My father-in-law and my husband had told me to take this route because it’s very pretty and very low traffic. Only they didn’t tell me to take the upper entrance and not the lower one. It didn’t matter as it was very pretty in both directions - the only thing was the hill at the end which I opted out of climbing, calling them to come pick me up instead.

On that road I was only passed by one vehicle, a truck pulling a stock trailer, and that was at the beginning of the road; I didn’t see anyone after that. I did pass an animal rescue where I saw a burro, an alpaca and several goats, also a lot of cattle and a few horses.

Overall it was a beautiful day for a ride. We’ll see what tomorrow brings!

Touring cemetaries