Being a father has it’s privileges, especially when there’s a day dedicated to your parenting whether you’re good at it or not.

This past weekend, the CiclaFamily had a few days off and our “Wanna Get Away” attitude brought us back to San Luis Obispo, but this time the wife also brought along a bike.

Oh, and I took two.

We drove out on Thursday renting a Chevy Traverse just to get an idea what a larger SUV could do for a hopefully expanding family.

While my bike rack holds three bikes, the family ones have such strange geometry that I could only fit two. Luckily, I stowed the third inside with plenty of extra space.

Yum. Bubblegum alley.

Although I had not been since being a teenager, we arrived in time for the weekly Farmers Market which shuts down blocks along the main street downtown.

I thought that since Cal Poly was out and it being Game 6 of the NBA Finals, it would be less crowded than I remembered it, but apparently not.

This is what happens when you turn streets over to people.

San Luis Obispo is also a very strong cycling community, so many of the bike racks were completely filled since finding parking is a difficult thing to do(yeah!).

We headed to Avila Beach on Friday, which my wife suggested cycling to(about ten miles), but seeing how slow our bikes were coupled with our daughter’s continued struggle with potty training, we drove our Hotwire.com special over.

This community is really small, so holding finishes in both the 2013 & 2015 Tour of California looks tenuous, especially when you have a Peter Sagan going full bore for the win last year.

One place we stopped into was Peloton Cellars sporting a cycling theme as you can tell the owner is an avid two-wheeler himself.

I’m not the biggest wine connoisseur, but my wife bought a couple of bottles if that’s any indication.

Peloton Cellars in Avila Beach

I had ambitious cycling plans for myself for the weekend as well, but I was only able to muster out a short ride on Saturday morning still catching up on sleep from a tough month and a half working on Bike Month and the LA River Ride.

The one I got in was a reverse of the Prefumo Canyon ride I did a couple of months back. This was my first time out on a new gravel bike I won off an ebay auction(this will be another post), so the ride was a bit muted as I was still making adjustments on the fly.

Later that morning, I assembled the CiclaFamily on a day on bikes, something we had been looking forward to all trip long. We started out towards Art’s Cyclery, which was a bit more out of town than we had thought.

Looking down Prefumo Canyon. Heavenly.

While our plans was to purchase another pannier backpack, we ended up getting CV Jr. a new helmet which was long overdue.

Coming back was headwind city, so I did my job as a domestique taking pulls in the wind so my wife didn’t have to bear the brunt. Wasn’t this supposed to be Father’s Day Weekend?

We stopped into Wally’s Bikes on the way back into town that had the feel of a neighborhood store, but with plenty of goods from the high end bikes to the classics.

One thing that caught my eye was the in-house conversion of a road bike to electric. The industry seems to be moving in this direction, but I have never seen this done to a bike with 23mms. The owner was super friendly and we found the backpack we were looking for.

We headed out way back into downtown feeling free not being tied to refilling the meter every two hours. We had ice cream, let CV Jr. play around in the Children’s Museum for a couple of hours, went shopping and finished off with dinner.

Being able to do all of this while not having to worry about a car is like knowing someone is going to take your dog out for a walk while you’re gone.

The last hurdle of the day was making the ride back to our hotel, not that we were inebriated, but we had a little bit of a hill heading back.

When I’m on my regular rides, this incline is no problem as it’s only 50 feet of climbing over a half mile, but on my old mountain bike with a forty pounder in the back, I was doing some serious spinning to make it over the hump.

We probably could have used our bikes more over the weekend, but we’re at the place where each new adventure encourages more. We’ll be back again San Luis Obispo and maybe next time, we’ll be taking a train instead.