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Stage 8: ‘Another Epic’ into Fort Bragg CA
The day started off with another dull highway section and fog (call me crazy but the fog slowly seems to be getting warmer – not to be mistaken with warm). The ‘continental breakfast’ was coffee and little Debbie’s oatmeal cakes, not that I don’t’ find LD to be a staple race food, but I find myself arguing with a Chinese lady about the definition of Continental meals. We head down the street to the Best Western and eat there.

Here in California the rivers are a little drier, and we spend most of the morning snaking up the Eel River towards Humboldt Redwoods State Park. We take the scenic loop through the park though lots of towering trees. Riding along I can’t help but laugh at a sign reading ‘big tree’. We stopped to investigate, and it’s not so much big as 1500 years old. Like many redwoods somewhere along the line it’s lost its top, but it’s still big enough that some hundred feet up in the air 3 smaller trees are growing out of it.

Dr. Evil is the trips official statistician, equipped with his altimeter and other gear, he would bark out numbers correlating to feet climbed on any certain hill, or BOB shift. I didn’t need his Polar Altimeter to realize that we were doing a lot of climbing today. Not really gaining much altitude, but continuous ups and downs.

As we reach 101 it’s warm enough to take off our knee warmers, but then we’re into the ‘Avenue of the Giants’ –old 101 - which block out our newly found sunlight – and we’ve got the thermals back on again. It’s really is a cool strip of roads, but not as mystic as yesterdays morning slog.

At lunch time I got suckered into paying $1.50 to ride my bike through the ‘drive thru tree’. 5km down the road there was a free one.

For the most part following the yellow arrows keeps us off the main route, but there’s an 8 mile section where we’re sharing the golf-cart-path of a road with the 18 wheelers. I’m guessing logging restrictions here have prevented any road widening (not to mention that much of it was in a canyon). It ends just as we pass through Leggett and reach the 101/ Hwy 1 fork.

400m of descending and we come to a sign ‘no services next 28 miles’. Yeah whatever, and we keep on steaming. 4 mile climb at 7% pitch, we were out of food and water at the bottom, by top we’re getting thirsty, Evil starts waving empty water bottles at passing cars, but they’re not getting the hint. At the top we flag down a blue euro van, and Martin, a transplant German triathlete stops and mixes water with cranberry juice for us, and we start off on what turns out to be a pretty long, and ‘funnest descent ever’ descent.

Ripping through corners, we can see the blanket of fog approaching (the cold stuff again), and the sun is getting a little low in the sky. At the bottom of the hill, we find that Martin has left out some more water for us at the side of a bridge (which goes over very well), we turn our lights on before we start this latest climb, and see the familiar sight of our blue euro van driving back towards us.
Thick German accent What is your back up plan?
As with all our other days, the plan is simply to ride until we get there, and then find a place to stay. Martin says that our next town doesn’t have a place to stay, and that there’s nothing for a long way down the road. He can’t fit both bikes in the car, but if we want a ride we can hide one bike in the bushes… There is only 20 minutes of daylight, What is your backup plan? Gets repeated, and we talk for another 15 minutes, before convincing him that we’re OK to head out on our way. We get the descent to the coast finished just as it gets really dark. A few miles later we pull into West Port (the town with a gas station and ‘Der Mega Store’ which is actually a must see if you’re ever passing through. It’s a small town store which sells mainly organic items, and the lady behind the counter is a fire cracker. Full of organic ham and fig bars, we go back out into the dark for the next 16 miles into Ft. Bragg.

To be honest, we couldn’t have chosen a better road to ride in pitch black (except maybe for the 100 foot drop into the ocean off our starboard bow.

On an exciting note, this was the first day that we weren’t rained upon.

this trip is Supported by…
Action Sports – if you need high end bike stuff this is where you can get it. 661-833-4000
BOB
KHS bicycles helped out as well.

Sooo. Yeah time lapsed a little here, so summary in point form.

We stopped again in Bodega Bay, which is a famous tourist trap, and where the people stopped being (as) cool and friendly. Rode into San Fran and got to hang out with Ms. Hall a little, which was cool, but she had to wake up at 4am to go run a Marathon. She almost talked me into running the fool thin, which would have been funny. Because once we got underway (fog, cold, got lost) we found ourselves on the Marathon course, and noticed the 15000 participants were all women. The odd thing was the climb up beside the golden gate bridge around 10km in started a continuous line of thousands of shed tops. I was all for savaging for fitting tops, but the incessant headwinds had put us behind schedule.

We caught and passed some
Swiss people
who have been riding over 2.5 years now… WOW! They seemed really cheerful, and they had wire baskets on the front of their bikes which they had laundry clothespegged onto for drying.

Santa Cruz is weird. Really weird. We watched a Steamers surf contest, but it was so foggy that you couldn’t actually see anything. Rent the ‘Lost Boys’ that movie is just how the town is.

We had lunch the next day with Dr. Evil’s friend Jock, who turned out to be legendary cyclist Jonathan Boyer, he was a really cool, down to earth guy. He’s probably most famous for almost winning the world championships, only to be chased down meters from the line by Greg LeMond (yeah they were team mates, and no LeMond didn’t end up winning
either… He is really excited about the possibility of racing solo RAAM next year. He east VERY well (lunch with him spoiled our ‘king sized snickers bar diet”.

Just past the big hill in Big Sur we got a chance to look at 4 of the last remaining California Condors. They’re really ugly damned birds, but there are so few of them that they are quite literally numbered. After that we found ourselves trapped in the dark with little option and had to stay in a VERY small town (3 buildings) of Lucia. The cheapest single room was $225, but after a little talking we got it for $125. What’s funny is that we got discounts every night from the hotels (except the wankers in Bodega Bay – beware the very annoying fog horn when you are trying to sleep) because their prices are so arbitrary.

Stage 13 saw us in Grover Beach CA, this was also the day we were planning on being in San Diego, and we made the decision to head inland to Bakersfield to recover… 10 am Start and we were getting set to head up over hwy 166, except that we though we should fuel up before the ’68 miles no services’ section of high desert. Problem was that the only place to buy food was 6 miles behind us, and we had a strict no backtracking policy. There turned out to be a Frito Lay packaging station, and the employee’s took pity on us, so we left with 12 cans of Mt. Dew, and so many free Cheetos that upon getting ‘home’ I threw out the remainder. The high desert proved to be the warmest time of our trip. Stopping for a pee break I noticed that I was leaving shoe prints in the road tar, to celebrate we both took off our knee warmers for the first time. The total for the day was something over 160 miles and true to form we battled headwinds all but a few miles coming into Bakersfield on the bike path (the winds generally die down after dark).

Photo Dump:
Lonbard Street San Fran

Entering Santa Cruz County

Monterey

Giany Condor

High Desert

4th giant snickers of the day — Taft