“You do know that it is the middle of winter, right?” I received the above one-sentence email from my old friend Bernie a few days ago after he subscribed to 82rpm. I chuckled as I read it, so Bernie I thought, his brand of spot on wisdom eternally short and sweet. But as a child of the Midwest, I’ve always compared California winters to the raging blizzards of my youth, storms that elicited joyous school closings and numbed one’s speech after hours of snowball fights and shoveling driveways. To me the term ‘winter’ had always seemed awkward at best when paired with ‘California’. And besides, everything I’d read about tackling the Southern Tier bicycle route suggested starting in early March or early September to avoid the most oppressive temperatures, and our planned departure day of February 26