Sunday, September 21, 2008

Westport to Gualala

76 miles, 4950 feet of climbing, road kill (1 deer, 1 squirrel, 1 raccoon, 1 hawk, 1 bird, 5 snakes, 4 skunks, 3 unidentified furry things, 1 pile of vomit)

What a day! After feeling a bit depressed yesterday, having missed a nice section of the ride, today more than made up for it. Without question, the ride today was the best overall day of the trip. Fantastic scenery, great road surface, not too much traffic and a nice tail wind much of the time.
After a hearty and delicious breakfast, we left DeHaven Valley Inn rather late under beautiful sunny skies. We made rather quick work of the miles to the bike shop just south of Mendocino, then waited 75 minutes for them to have a lull in their customer traffic so they could fix Arn's spoke. We decided that the day was so nice that we wanted to cycle while the cycling was good. So, we rode and rode and rode. We would have ridden even more but decided to stop just north of Gualala to stay at St. Orres - a place Arn stayed at 20 years ago.
Barring any maintenance problems, we should roll into San Francisco on Wednesday sometime. Our current thinking is to stay in the Bay Area until Sunday morning or Monday morning, then bike south to Cambria/San Luis Obispo over the next 4-5 days. SLO will probably be the end point for our journey south unless we stop when we hit SF! The route near Santa Barbara has too much 101 pedaling and it isn't worth it.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Great to see the ongoing steady progress.
Keep up the great updates.
-Mark