In which I lead my first ride

And no one is lost! Hurrah!

Yesterday I led my first club ride, and it went quite well, I thought. For some reason that made sense at the time, I created a route that was all hills for the first part, including one that I had to stop midway on the only other time I'd tried it. A sensible person would have picked something tamer for the first ride they were going to lead. Go figure.

I was worried both about not being able to do the first hill (Parker Ranch, which is short but a tough 17% or so) and about maybe not having people show up, since I didn't start the ride at one of the usual starting places. I figured since I was leading it, it should start somewhere near my house.

I shouldn't have worried, because there were already a bunch of people at the start when I got there, and several more showed up after. I had nine people go with me, and several more went on the B (less hills) ride with the same endpoints.

Clearly the most important thing about leading a ride is actually not whether you can stay out front, but whether you've gotten all the turns clearly indicated on the route sheet.
And whether you've used a large enough font. I used routeslip.com, and it created a font that every person complained about...live and learn.

Anyhow, we made over all the hills just fine, and I managed to call back people the few times they made a wrong turn in front of me. Turned out there was a farmers market in Los Gatos when we got there, so that made a nice ambience for lunch.

No map pics today, because of the side-effects of my encountering a stupid bug in Garmin's software. It somehow caused my Edge to be unable to talk to it, and I forgot to download a tracklog before I (repeatedly) hard reset the Edge to try to correct the problem. Grr. Aargh.

However, here are the pics I have..mostly I was too busy riding to take pics, not neccessarily a bad thing.

Pics

To sum up, much coolness, and I made it up Parker Ranch much faster than before, no need to stop at all. Took Son #2 out for the first ride he's done in ages the day before, which is also a Good Thing.