Big Sur to Cambria

75 miles, 5050 feet of climbing, road kill (2 mice, 2 rattlesnakes, 1 big unidentified furry thingy)

What a fantastic day of riding! Deborah's favorite day of the entire trip. One of the best two days for Arn.

It is hard to describe just how fabulous the cycling was today. Fantastic and varied scenery; long climbs and descents; and very little traffic.

What more could you ask for? We'll tell you. Turns out, CalTrans decided to give us a wedding anniversary present. About 10 miles south of Big Sur, they were stopping traffic for 20 minutes at a time while they did "scaling" on the cliffs above a section of road. The net effect of this was that for the next 2-3 hours, we had virtually no traffic - save for a blast of cars every twenty to thirty minutes that passed in a pack.
That's right. We got to cycle the absolutely best part of the California coast taking up virtually an entire lane of traffic. Truth be told, even without this CalTrans gift, the traffic would have been light.

As we got further south, the higher altitude air was full of lots of smoke from some fires still burning in Los Padres National Forest. Much of this area was closed 2 months ago because of fires. It didn't effect the riding but did effect the pictures a little.
We saw lots of touring cyclists today. When we were most of the way to Ragged Point - on the very last big hill of the day - we saw a gal up ahead of us who was absolutely suffering. She eventually resorted to pushing her bike. Arn joked that she was on a single speed. Well, turns out, she was. What a studette! We can't believe that someone would cycle this section of road fully loaded on a single speed. Perhaps she was a future Olympian? When we asked her where she was going, she replied, "To the beach." All righty then!
The last 25 miles from Ragged Point to Cambria was virtually effortless. Almost flat terrain with a tailwind and it was fun to push forward at 20-25 MPH after crawling through all of the hills. We thought about continuing on to Morro Bay (another 20 miles) but the choices for accommodations/restaurants weren't as nice as Cambria so we just stopped.

While here, Arn stopped into Cambria bikes. They have a huge web presence but a pretty ordinary shop in town. He spoke to one of the guys in the shop who mentioned that some group of riders was stuck at Ragged Point. One in their group had a broken pedal - another had a busted frame. OUCH! Hopefully they secured a shuttle.

Tomorrow we have an easy 38 mile ride to SLO and the end of our tour!