End of the line: Part 1

After arriving at my grandparents (see the last post) I took some days off the bike to unwind before heading to San Francisco.

Riding past Sausalito after descending from Mill Valley

A momentous occasion! It was very unpleasant riding though — super loud traffic, pedestrians, wobbly tourists on rental bikes going the other way and a crosswind caught the large, flat sides of my bags, blowing me around! Turns out I was just another wobbly tourist

Cable car

I "drove" a self-driving car through San Francisco on my birthday. Thrilling to see the wheel turning by itself and I felt surprisingly safe — it drove smoothly and I thought it would probably be better at accurately following traffic laws than humans! Hopefully full self-driving cars will be available to consumers in the next couple decades so I can own one without a driver's license

I had a great time exploring singletrack on Mt Sutro in the city. My touring bike is similar in many ways to the earliest mountain bikes, which makes it feel awkward and slightly out of control, but fun, off-road

Leaving SF a couple days later was unenjoyable, especially after stopping the tour for over a week (you get used to the luxuries of house living pretty quickly!) The weather was cold, cloudy and foggy, with my sunglasses ending up covered in droplets of water. Getting into and out of cities is the worst riding on any bike trip; entering SF was an outlier because you're in the thick of it immediately after crossing the Golden Gate Bridge. Leaving it was unfortunately like all other cities, where you have to ride through boring suburbs and business/industrial areas. I bypassed a road closure sign and had a totally clear road for a while (after some research, that stretch is apparently extremely dangerous so it was lucky timing). Eventually I reached a police car, and the officer pointed to a trail going up the hillside to bypass the section he was guarding. It ended up being a fun mini adventure with some challenging sections to ride on a loaded bike. From the cliff I could see a blackened, charred car sitting in the middle of the road below!

Well into the day the weather cleared and I crossed paths with Ben, my British pen pal and mentor, who was riding up the coast to get back to Redwood City. I had a big tailwind which was highly problematic for him going the other direction — good training though 😄

Santa Cruz — further than I expected to get that day, and a new vibe for the trip with its palm trees and busy boardwalk. One of my camp neighbors works for the (incredibly expensive and boringly named) mountain bike brand Santa Cruz

Riding Highway 1 the next day was not fun with heavy traffic and cloudy skies. I had to snap a picture of this sign though because I couldn't believe the price

But that was somehow undercut on the next sign!

Helicopter crop dusting — it looked like extremely fun (and dangerous) flying, zooming just above the ground before pulling up, swinging the tail around and tearing across the field in the opposite direction like it was flying on an invisible half-pipe

I made my way towards Monterey before heading inland to Salinas, a fork in the roads for my trip. I ate dinner at a Mexican restaurant where I was the only white person — a good sign! The Coke was imported from Mexico, meaning it has no corn syrup, only cane sugar (like in Europe). It's noticeably better than Coke from the U.S. of A.

The Big Sur section of Highway 1 is currently impassible due to a fresh landslide. Previously these landslides have been safe enough to sneak round on foot after waiting for construction crews to finish for the day, but this one covers the entire road to the edge of the cliff and is still unstable so getting across it would be life-threatening. There are two options to deal with this: a detour through the Salinas Valley, the "Salad Bowl of the World", or taking an Amtrak to San Luis Obispo, the next major town down the train line. This was a huge dilemma for me, because I didn't want to break the (nearly) continuous line I had ridden from Colorado or feel like I was being lazy, but the detour would add three days of inland (hot) riding, with a lot of it completely flat and agricultural and with zero shade. Stay tuned to find out what I ended up doing! 👀