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Published: August 13th 2012
I haven't been able to blog as often as planned. That means quite a lot has happened since I last wrote. I've been to protests, met hippies, pot farmers, been offered jobs, swam in the sea, cycled in 36 degree heat and have been cycling as part of a group of 4 who got into Frisco at 11pm on Thursday after an 80 mile ride getting lost around the headlands north of Golden Gate Bridge. I will maybe make some effort to condense it into a readable size, but then it's not like you have to read it all, so i'm not too hung up on that. I also accidently deleted all the notes i'd been keeping on my phone, so this is a mish mash of what i can remember, and could indeed be completely fabricated.
George and I combined cycling forces with Brian from Quebec and Michael from Michigan for about 600 and 200 miles respectively. Brian is a juggling, aspiring micro brewer with a soft spot for direct action. He is a student on strike from Quebec (though is travelling on his student loan and doesn't plan to return to uni) and listens to anti authority music in many forms. Michael is a guy we picked up in Arcata who only planned to ride for a couple days but made a week of it. It's nice to cycle with new friends. It's the social equivalent of hearing a new song when you have been singing the same bloody line from one all day. After San Fran George and I will hit the road again as a duo. Even though being in a city is amazing, there's a small tug to get on the road in the back of my mind.
Since the Reggae Festival (which I now remember quite fondly) we have cycled down through the rest of Oregon and through Northern California ('the emerald triangle'😉. California republic flags (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_California.svg) fly alongside the stars and stripes here and people talk about independence vaguely in a long term kinda tone. The world of medical marajuana means the state has a huge ecomony and is fairly self reliant, which breeds a good sense of community and an array of local produce and all the organic hippy stuff that that entails. Interestingly, the people involved in the industry don't want it to be legalised on a federal level because currently the small(ish) farmer is king and the big bastard companies aren't involved to suck the soul out of the business and leave it as a withered, albeit profitable, corpse.
We have met a fair few pot farmers and trimmers. One such guy was when we were staying at Far West hostel near Port Orford back in Oregon. We worked out he oversaw about $10 million of pot, which is considered medium in stature. The whole experience at FarWest was wicked and humbling. It's not a hostel in the conventional sense just yet, just a thing that the guy who runs it (Brian) is trying to set up because he likes hearing about other cultures and their problems to make himself feel better about America's problems. Brian accosted us leaving a farmers market in Bandon 40 miles north of Port Orford and gave us a business card for the hostel. We took it gratefully and were excited by the fact that FarWest was ran off a donations only basis. However, when we got a few miles down the road and started to consider our route to FarWest, we realised the only indication of it's location on the card was longtitude and latitude (it turns out this is to stop 'vagrants' taking advantage of the hostel). Still, we took on the mission of finding the address (the internet made it quite easy) and found the hostel, even if at first we thought it was a small abandoned neighbourhood, we wnded up staying there for 4 nights.
The community around the hostel was incredibly welcoming and disarming. Alongside me, George and Brian there was Laura (Australia), Julie (Quebec), Brian (hostel host), his wife Nicole, their children Olivia (3) and Raleigh (1), their honourary child Chappy (about 35), Bex (50ish year old Mexican lady who lived next door and brought her home brew round) and, for the final few hours a lady who following brain surgery to cure epilepsy was walking from Alaska to Chile. All in all a pretty inspiring crowd.
Whilst we were there we were part of the family. The protest i mentioned earlier was to do with this:
https://www.facebook.com/missionformarcene . Nicole and Brian were kinda heading it up so we popped along for the protest and attended the potluck party for making banners where we caught and cooked some fresh crab. The folks around the rally were about as diverse as it gets. My favourite guy there was the 60 year old former hippie guy who was now thinking of getting back into hallucenigenics in light of him discovering a new open view on the world. He is on twitter as a medical marajuana advocate, but i forgot his name so can't put a link here.
FarWest were not the only noteworthy people we have stayed with via couchsurfing/warmshowers, but i won't go into as much detail about the others for your sake (see i said i'd make an effort to condense things, but that's all you are getting). There's been David (A mix of Ron Burgundy and Austin Powers from South London living in the old town hall in Brookings), Steve (we slept in a half renovated school bus in a garden with 4 goats, 15 chickens a couple rabbits and i think a few cats and dogs), and now in San Fran with Tom (works for Google designing Google maps). Between Couchsurfers and Warmshowers theres a huge group of people around the world and if anyone isn't part of them alreayd, i'd genuinely recommend it, even if it's just for a free place to stay next time you go away.
Between these stops there has been some cycling. You'll be glad to know - at least, i'm glad to know - we have now climbed the highest hill (~2000ft) and the steepest hill we will face on the trip, so the mental barriers have been broken and there's no stopping us. The scenery seems to get better and better with each change in surroundings. We've now gone through the rainforest in Washington, the cliffs in Oregon and are hitting the beaches in California on this leg of the trip. I think California has been my favourite in the scenic stakes, the road (highway 1) hugs the coastline with rolling hills and steep, steep switchbacks. I wish my camera was good enough to do the coast justice but, alas, I am using my phone as a camera so I guess I made my bed. Perhaps my view of the California Coast has been tainted by the sun we've been having here. Couple that with the constant sea breeze and it's good cycling weather. Though I'm not sure i'll get used to the tan lines.
The people you meet cycling range from very normal to completely fooking mental which keeps things interesting. Away from the cities fellow cyclists always wave and say hi (my favourite was being greeted by an old couple with a completely unintentional Alan Patridge 'Aha!'
) which after a while becomes second nature and less and less meaningful but hey ho i'm not going to be the dickhead who didn't wave. It's in the hiker biker campsites where you really get to know the other people on two wheels (read 'where you really get to realise how mad everyone is'😉. There's been the 60 year old who tours constantly in memory of his late wife, the rotund man who has been hitch hiking siunce 1969 and is on his 3rd time round the world (I swapped him some instant coffee for 3 books), Taylor who was travelling north to Oregon for fishing work with his pitbull mum and adopted puppy pair, a Salt Lake City couple who played us their music within half an hour of meeting, a girl who retired at campsites to a tree to play the fiddle for the evening and a lot more that I can't remember right now (see above mobile phone note deleting incident). I might recall them at some point in conversation back at home but if I don't i'll probably be more mentally balanced for it.
Inevitably cycling this far brings with it a few bike issues. I am now devoid of my 12th - 18th gears as my outer chain ring totally bent in half. The guy cycling in memory of his wife kinda flattened it out using a large log and a fair degree of bloodyminded battery to mean I could still cycle with it, but that put to bed any hope of using it again. Still, with the load on the bike I didn't use those gears much anyway. Even without them the new trip top speed is 46mph which, if thats hard to rationalise, is fast enough to be at the mercy of small flusters of wind and start to feel a bit out of control. Though after the uphill that prceeded it, it was a welcome brief rest. The other notable bike issue was a loose pedal arm. The final 8 miles of one day I cycled alone because i had to stop every mile or so to do a half arsed job on the arm with some pliers. Not great fun, but at least the sun was out and I could look forward to swimming in the sea at the camp that evening, even if George and I reeked of Britishness as we squirmed at every newly breaking wave. When the pedal arm came loose (towards the top of the trips steepest hill), i shit you not vultures circled overhead. Vultures are scraggy horrible birds. http://kaweahoaks.com/html/turkey_vulture.html. Trivia, they did a test were they fed them properly and they actually grew the hair back on their head. But i guess it's something to see some wild vultures alongside the hawks, eagles, storks, herons, and, in one instance, turkeys. Elk also made an appearence which was, in one sense, pretty great but in the sense that it was getting late and they were just standing there blocking the road, the occasion was ever so slightly tainted by annoyance but i wouldn't say that to their face because they were pretty big.
San Francisco (where i am now), is an incredible place. Not physically very large, but culturally pretty massive. Lots of Beat generation stuff mixed in with a punk scene, the standard hipster scene and a whole lot of microbrewery's, ice cream shops (including this one http://smittenicecream.com/home/Our_Story.html which was real good), coffee shops (America is fuelled by coffee) and a whole bunch of stuff to see. We had a cycle along the waterfront checking out the piers (very touristy), finding out that Alcatraz is booked up for the next 2 weeks and buying tickets for the Giants baseball game which we went to yesterday. That was quite an experience. At the end of the 7th innings they had a rendition of 'God Bless America' whilst a video montage of the country played on the big screen. I took the chance to look around at the people singing and was a bit weirded out to see that they actually meant it. They were totally serious. At least, it was either that or their dedication to delivering ironic performances was leagues ahead of my comprehension. I decided yesterday that i think Baseball might be a shit sport, which oddly means i have more respect for the whole spectacle around it because despite the main draw being a bit crap, i actually had a really good time in the festival atmosphere around the stadium. Every night in San Fran we've managed to find somewhere fun, from the ramones tribute band in someones loft to the 25th birthday celebration of the (apparently) famous brewery Toronado with some really nice locals (http://www.toronado.com/) this city hasn't disappointed.
hmmmm, what else, what else.....
Oh, check out this guy that we ran into in the Avenue of the Giants http://www.worldguy.org/ Very surreal seeing a six foot globe being pushed through some of the worlds largest/oldest/most awe-inducing trees.
I think i'm addicted to chocolate milk (it's good for the protein, i tell myself).
Brian flies back to Quebec on Wednesday which is a shame but a good excuse for a celebration. On Wednesday too George and I make tracks south to reach Santa Cruz in a couple days, Monterrey (home of this aquarium http://www.montereybayaquarium.org/ which i'm unusually excited about) couple days after that then a few days to LA. From there we are going Vegas (so I can win big and afford to eat for the remainder of the trip) before hitting the Mexican border and having a look through the drug cartel ridden lands of Mexico, so don't be surprised if George and I take inspiration from Breaking Bad and come back laden with dirty dirty money. Or, I guess on the flip side, we could be grieviously injured and mentally scarred from a whole kidnapping nightmare. Either way, it'll make for a damn good blog (if i ever remember how to not write like a defective science experiment).
Again, it's quite nice to get comments on this blog for some reason, so feel free to leave one. Even if you haven't read it all because you got tricked by me suggesting i'd make it brief, I won't hold it against you.
Taht's all for now, going to check out the beat museum and mission district (where Mission Burrito comes from - 2nd bit of trivia, lucky you).
Lots of love, take it easy.
Dom.
P.s. the only other thing i can think to mention is the unreasonable relief I felt when we found that the Californian border had stopped the same fruit practise we experience on the US - Can border so we didn't have to eat all teh fruit we'd just bought in one sickly, acidic fruit binge.
San Francisco
People - 8/10
Food - 8/10
Place - 9/10
Would definitely visit again.
Selected cycling stats for the day -
Number of flat tyres - I dunno, maybe 4. I don't keep count, that'd be weird.
Total height climbed so far (which I do keep count of) - 65,000 feet.
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Tot: 0.342s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 11; qc: 48; dbt: 0.0541s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.4mb
Matt
non-member comment
Jealous jealous jealous. Of a very well written blog and of an awesome trip. Nice :-)