I had to go up to SF to pick up something from Nathan so Melinda and I went for our first official tootle of 2023. And it was a very windy one. I almost didn't think it was a good idea to ride given the gusty conditions. We could hear the bridge howling from the top of Hawk Hill. More on that later. The plan was to meet around lunch and grab food on the ride, I didn't know where we were riding at first. I guess Melinda was thinking the Hawk Hill loop was going to take less time but she also didn't anticipate her legs feeling so good. We ended up climbing it 2 1/2 times. Crossing the GGB was sketchy. I'm so glad we were on the east side. Even though we had to dodge people, I much prefer that to the crosswinds. Even on the east side there were still some crosswinds you had to be careful about. The wall of wind you're normally hit by at the top of the first steep section wasn't there surprisingly. But at the next turn there was one. And at the top, it seemed like maybe the wind wasn't so bad so after the first ascent we descended the backside down to the headlands. At first it seemed fine but then we were hit by so much wind. It was too late to turn around and we just had to be really careful. On the first time up, Melinda was commenting on how it was easier the last time she did it just a week or two ago. We didn't figure out why until the 2nd time up when after the roundabout, I saw her looking down at her gears. I took a look and told her she still had two more gears to drop down to. Only she couldn't shift any lower which made no sense. When we got to the top, I could see that there was a gap between the low limit screw and the derailleur. I could push her derailleur over to the lowest gear so something was going on with the cable. She had a Zwift incident where the chain hopped off so maybe when that happened, the cable got shifted too. Despite grinding up the climb, she was feeling good. There was a coyote just hanging out on the flat section before the McCullough roundabout. Melinda saw it up on the hill and we stopped to take photos. She joked that it was coming down for me but it really was. It trotted up to a car that had stopped to take a photo as well, clearly waiting for food. This coyote had been habitualized to get food from people - not good. It was there every time we passed the spot going up and down. Also at that spot was this old Caprice that did donuts and a huge burnout on our 2nd time up at the top. Climbing McCullough, I realized, the last time I climbed it was with Melinda on our very first ride. Because of the extra laps of Hawk Hill we did, we didn't end up getting lunch. It was starting to get late enough that we didn't want to potentially have to ride back after sunset since neither of us brought lights. We just headed back and got food after. We didn't think we'd be out for so long.