Big Ride - Final Update
Posted by Nick:
Greetings from home.
Following a rest day in Fort Bragg that included another vegetable-intensive breakfast, lunch at the brewery, and my lurking cold finally fully developing, we set out on a 112-mile death march to Bodega Bay, filming location for Hitchcock’s The Birds.
While the other Big Riders were laughing at me behind my back while doing their laundry, I was talking to a well-tattooed local who was interested in our trip, thought what we were doing was awesome and, most importantly, told me to visit Glass Beach.
Glass Beach is an old garbage dump on waterfront in Fort Bragg. I don’t know the specifics, but it looks like somebody covered the dump with fill dirt and tried to turn it into a park. As the ocean eats away at the shoreline, it exposes buried garbage that has become fused to the dirt and rocks. The beach surface is equal parts small pebbles and tumbled glass from broken bottles. It sounds sick to admire the tenacity of the garbage, but it’s really quite beautiful. It’s a wild experience to stand on a shimmering floor of green and blue and white and brown and purple and red. Dan, the guy who told me about the beach, said people go there and collect bits of glass to use in mosaics. Jutting out of the glass were rocks with sparkplugs, shoes, hubcaps and bits of rebar embedded. Fossils already. As I said, the tenacity of our garbage was amazing and shocking. It doesn’t go away.
With my cold now in full swing, I wearily pedaled back to camp and tried to take a nap while our campsite mates Dave and Karen cleaned bikes and Carry read the latest Northwest Brewing News. We walked to a very cool and pretty crowded Mexican restaurant just outside the campground for dinner. I had meatball soup and was grateful for the salty broth.
The day after our rest day featured the same relentless rollers that characterized the last part of the day before. A never-ending series of sweeping descents to the left followed by a sharp right-hand bend and a climb back to the level you started from. “Why not just build bridges?” we wondered. This was a long day. I rode with Carry the whole time and we rolled into camp at about 6:00 in the evening. Dinner was at 6:30. Many people came in on the support vehicles, with the exception of a few riders who managed to miss the sweep cars and cruised into camp, 24 oz. cans of Fosters held triumphantly aloft, well after dark.
The last two days were uneventful from a riding and scenery perspective. Carry and I had been craving a dinner of bread, fruit, cheese and wine for a week now. En route to our final campsite, we stopped in Point Reyes and purchased said items. The entire group was jealous. “You guys have cheese. Oh my, you guys have (gasp) strawberries!” Good times at the campfire.
On our final cruise into San Francisco, we passed through Sausalito. If I were a billionaire, I would move there. I loved its pedestrian-friendly layout, narrow streets with wide sidewalks, abundance of useful shops including the coolest bike shop I’ve ever been in. I loved how the houses are built almost on top of each other on the hillsides, attempting to maximize the number of people who could live with the view.
I’d visited San Francisco often during my sailing career, racing frequently out of the St. Francis Yacht Club, practically underneath the Golden Gate Bridge. I’d never been on the bridge though. It’s a major bicycle route so it was busy. The temperatures were chilly, the bay was foggy and of course windy. Nonetheless, I was pretty excited to be up there, looking down on the Saturday morning yachting scene, riding my bike through throngs of tourists exiting their busses at Golden Gate Park.
I relished the cruise through the Presidio and along the waterfront, visiting the beach where, while competing in a major collegiate sailing invitational regatta about nine years ago, under the watchful eyes of competitors and coaches alike, I turned my boat parallel to the beach to land oblivious to the huge wave about to hit me beam on. The boat rose up on the wave and suddenly dropped away, leaving my crew, Tracy, and I to gracelessly back flip into the Bay. Fond memories.
Just when we thought the end (hot showers) was near, calamity arose. It was about 12:30 and our hotel wasn’t ready for 41 sweaty cyclists to arrive in their lobby wanting to change clothes and clean up. Refusing to check anyone into a dirty room, we were left to park bikes in the lobby and sit around looking kind of gross. Rooms came available as they were cleaned, but it had me wondering why they couldn’t simply let us in our rooms so we could drop off luggage and take a shower, cleaning the room when they could get to it. Somebody tell me why I can’t take a shower while the sheets are still dirty. We wrapped our bikes in our Big Mr. Squishy Therm-a-Rests for the truck ride home, took showers and hit the town.
Transitioning back to civilization was not as difficult this time. We’d visited towns all along the coast so the shock of walking down a crowded street was not as pronounced as it had been when we returned from hiking the West Coast Trail on Vancouver Island a few years ago. What was shocking, however, was how slow it felt to walk. I usually walk a little faster than most. The crowds packing the sidewalks at Fisherman’s Wharf and along the waterfront were spending a lot of time stopping, walking suddenly diagonally, and generally not adhering to the iron-clad rules of traffic management. We just about went nuts! All these people are going, what, four miles per hour? Ridiculous! ?If you can’t handle the pace, get off the sidewalk!? I wanted to shout. I had, after all, spent the last two weeks traveling at an average of 17 miles per hour.
I would do this again in a heart beat, though I would prefer to do it properly, with a small group of friends and carrying our own gear, like Carry and I did on our honeymoon. I’ve always wanted to ride this stretch of road, particularly in Oregon, but I’ve always been curious about California as well. I would like to finish the west coast, from San Francisco to Mexico. I’d like to go north into Canada.
Riding your bike is an incredible way to tour. You get to see more, smell more, stop for coffee in more interesting places and meet some very interesting people. I feel like a more complete cyclist.
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