San Francisco to Sacramento (and more Sci-Fi rambling)

You know that you can sometimes tell when a storm is coming? This is one of those times. I’m tucked up waiting for it in a little bakery in Montrose, Colorado, watching every bit of dust and rubbish on the streets get picked up by the wind and blown around in tight cyclones. Where three hours ago there were beautiful sunny skies, now everything is dark and the air feels like it’s trying to strangle you. All very much like the bit with the plastic bag in American Beauty. I’ll stop there though, because I think you’ll all appreciate it if I don’t start going on about how there is “so much beauty in the world.”


Before I forget, I promised I’d post my verdict on the sixth Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy book by Eoin Colfer. If you’re a fan of the first five, I think it’s definitely worth reading. For completeness sake, if nothing else. (If you aren’t the slightest bit interested, you might as well skip to the next paragraph now, whilst I let my geek out for a bit.) Can you honestly tell me you don’t want to hear how Arthur and co escape from the impending destruction of “the” earth at the hands of the Grebulons? A few bit part characters from previous books return, get developed further and play pivotal roles in the story. There are also a lot of random diversions to quote bits from the Guide, which I missed in the last couple of Douglas Adams Hitchhikers books, although they aren’t terribly original.


(For anyone skipping the sci-fi bit, I’m afraid I’m still on Hitchhikers, as the previous paragraph was becoming unwieldy and I thought a new one was required, so you’ll want to skip this paragraph too.) There are some memorable lines, although the occasional contemporary reference, whilst funny, makes me think it won’t age as well as the other books. A typical example being:
“The ship was yellow and ungainly and would never feature on a froody Sub-Etha spaceship show where middle aged ex-racing drivers threw it around a test track while making jolly xenophobic remarks and claiming not to understand all the knobs and dials. This ship was clumsy in the way that comets are not.”
One of the great things about the original is that a sci-fi novel originally published more than 30 years ago, with the radio play even earlier, avoids feeling dated despite the technological changes in that period. Beyond that, I stand by my original remark that there isn’t enough Arthur in book six, but give it a try. That said, I’m now reading “The Last Don” by Mario Puzo (author of the Godfather), which I picked up for free in a book exchange at a recent motel, and it’s a far better book, so maybe I’d advise you read that first.


Enough of my sidetracks. I had a fantastic time in San Francisco. I liked the city just as much as I’d expected to and for one of the first times on the trip I was actually sociable! The hostel had a nice sociable atmosphere and there always seems to be plenty of people around and up for a chat and a beer. In particular though it’s worth mentioning, Brian from Colorado, who was in a similar position to me, although he’d actually left his job with a bank and was taking a bit of time to travel, and Tatsuro from Japan who turned out to be a Leeds fan. Thanks to some advice from Jess, who’d been there before, my wandering around the city was slightly less aimless than normal. Parts of the city were incredibly steep. I think the weirdest thing I saw was a section of Lombard St, which has a natural 27% grade. It is made artificially windy (as in twisty, they don’t have a big fan at one end of it), so that traffic can actually traverse it. Still seemed pretty steep to me!

I also spent a day on a Wine Tour out to the Napa and Sonoma valley. In the morning though, we went to Muir Woods, which is a grove of Redwoods named in honour of John Muir who was the founder of the Sierra Club and considered very influential in the establishment of the first National Parks in the US. The trees were 100s of years old and it was a fantastic walk. I even have a grainy and jerky video on my camera of a family of deer that were wandering around at the far end of the trails. As for the actual wine part of the day, it could have been worse! Spending an afternoon being driven between various vineyards, being plied with “sample” after “sample” of different varieties. After I explained at the last vineyard that I wasn’t able to buy anything, because I was travelling on a bike and couldn’t carry it (not to mention the £30 price tags), they were kind enough to dig out a half bottle and gave it to me for free.

After a much need four nights, I loaded the bike up again and crossed San Francisco bay on a ferry to Vallejo. It was a pretty clear morning, which provided by far the best views of the city and the huge bridges that span the bay.

The day before I was due to leave I found out that Vallejo was home to one of the Six Flags theme parks. Six Flags has a reputation for some pretty cool roller coasters, so for $30 a ticket I thought it was worth a visit. I’d made an assumption that, with it being a Tuesday and schools not quite having broken up, that it would be pretty quiet and I could just hit loads of rides and be on the road again by midafternoon with my brain still vibrating around my skull. I’m not sure what other people’s schools were like, but at the end of every year they tended to organise a few trips that people could go on in the last week of term. One of which was always Alton Towers or Thorpe Park (big theme parks in the UK for anyone from the rest of the world reading this). I’m not going to go any further with this, because I’m pretty sure you can all imagine the chaos that ensues when 3,000 school kids are dropped on a theme park with minimal supervision.

The next day I rode on to Sacramento where I was due to get a train. Before that though I had a nice couple of days, including a lovely evening chatting with a French-Canadian couple where I wowed them with my command of their native language (honest). Unfortunately my travel plans fell apart when I went along to the train station the day before I was due to leave, to scope things out. I think I mentioned this is a previous post, but the stop I wanted was unmanned, so they wouldn’t have been able to unload my bike, which had to be disassembled and stored as checked baggage. In depression I headed back to the hostel where I found a copy of Star Wars on video (yes, video) and spent two hours going over my alternatives, with some help from another guy in the hostel who was stranded in Sacramento after the steering on his car broke and he was going to have to wait five days for a part.

Funny how life always manages to remind you that your problems are normally pretty minor. No matter how important they might seem.

Finally, listening to Glastonbury over the internet. It’s a shame this trip meant I had to give my ticket back. I wasn’t that bothered about most of the bands playing, but it would have been nice to have gone with so many of my friends. Hope everyone is having/had a great time. Inexplicably BBC 6 Music is available live in the US, even though any other live streaming content seems to be blocked. The Flaming Lips are being so incredibly stereotypical it’s untrue. Ten minutes on the air and they’ve already hit “ain’t smoking weed cool” (crowd cheer and which the BBC just apologised for) and “didn’t George Bush suck” (crowd boo). I know I’m not a fan of Bono’s rants, but that kind of thing always just seemed too tick box. Groove Armada and Gorillaz, much better.

Storm has now passed by, so I’m off to get some food before going to see Toy Story 3 at the cinema in a bit.

Andy

Big Sur and the ride to San Francisco

Dear god I’ve become useless at getting round to writing this. Just like my diary from Central America last summer, which still only contains half the trip but has now sat by my bed for a year waiting for me to finish it. I’m thinking that might not happen.

So, having just watched England stumble to a very pathetic draw against Algeria (why do we have so many gifted footballers and yet not one player with a creative bone in their body?) and drunk four pints, which at 6,500ft are having more of an effect than normal, I thought I’d write another blog entry. Apologies if it seems unduly depressed.

My last entry (apart from the train one) had left me in San Luis Obispo, which is a very nice pretty town in Central California that is about 10 miles from the coast. The name is abbreviated, fairly appropriately, by the locals to SLO. It’s also home to Cal Poly (California Polytechnic State University), which meant the entire place was full of testosterone fueled frat boys. Apparently even more so than normal, because that was a reunion weekend where everyone who’d graduated in the last few years came back into town to catch up (/get drunk). You might be gathering that from this that drunk American college boys aren’t my favourite group of people. And you’d be right. I don’t like generalizations and most people I meet are great individually, but as a collective the nearest UK equivalent seems to be guys on a never ending stag do.

It was also Memorial Weekend, which mean prices for hotels were astronomical, if there was space at all. My usual lack of forward planning meant I didn’t realise this until the Wednesday night. I’m happy to characterise this as something like an idiot tax. If you can’t be aware enough to see it coming then you have to pay more. Sort of like the having to replace various high technology gadgets after dropping or spilling coffee on them (not mentioning any names, but you know who you are!)

As a result of this the cheapest motel room I could find for the Saturday night was $150. Thankfully I met a couple of guys in a bar on my first night who told me about a hostel in town and I managed to get the last bed they had for $27. I might have had to lie to the motel I was meant to be in about a blown tire meaning I was going to be a day late arriving, but I think it was worth it for the amount of money I saved. Happily they filled the room anyway.

Because of the number of people in town that weekend there were quite a few things happening that weekend. Unfortunately, my stinginess (which amazingly Word recognised as an actual word) meant that I didn’t get to see any of them. MGMT were playing some big festival on the Friday night just outside of town and I found a girl on the internet who had a spare ticket, but she kept changing her mind on the price. I’d get a facebook message one minute saying $40 and then a text five minutes later saying $70, so, given my lack of transportation there or back and the fact I don’t like MGMT that much, I decided it wasn’t worth the money.

Rather more depressingly, they also had a massive beer festival over the weekend that I couldn’t get a ticket for. In town there were quite a few nice places, but everything seemed to centre around one bar. They had seating for a couple of hundred and did food to go, but there was a permanent queue of about 60 people outside from midafternoon until 10pm every day I was there. I think a third of the building was just given over to a huge fridge to store all the food they went through! Far better though I found a little bakery that made these little doughy mounds stuffed with raspberries, which was possibly the best bready thing I’ve ever had. I also got my hair cut by a guy who was completely obsessed with British TV and seemed to have actually watched far more of it than I ever have.

From there I followed the coast north again, via some kayaking in Morro Bay, into the Big Sur area, where I found myself humming The Thrills song of the same name over and over again for at least a couple of days. The area itself was stunning. If you’ve ever seen the episode of Top Gear where they drive a car along the French Riviera, imagine that plus a bit more. The climbs were tough, but the descents were amazing, with the ocean on one side and cliffs on the other. I had my first night camping, which was a great success until the following morning when the fog rolled in leaving me and everything else with that slightly damp feeling. There weren’t even any showers to warm me up.

Once I returned to civilisation I had a fantastic evening at a hostel in Santa Cruz, which was only about two blocks from the beach, and a night in a hostel that was a converted lighthouse. After that there was just the matter of a ridiculously steep climb up into the clouds in Daly City to get down into San Francisco. Climbing on city streets is so much harder than in the countryside, because the gradients tend to be a lot steeper.

After a couple of weeks where I’d spent much more time in the country than the city, San Francisco felt huge. Just riding through Golden Gate Park seemed to take me half an hour. San Francisco was a bit of a paradox for a cyclist. There were tons of us around and quite a few cycle lanes, but we seemed to get less respect from car drivers than anywhere else I’d been. I was told there’s a bit of a war going on between the two and that the cyclists are getting slightly militant. One afternoon a month they take over the whole city centre and just ride round and round disrupting traffic, which can’t be helping matters. Then you get things like this http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_15246548?nclick_check=1.

Hmmm.
Andy

Trains

I’ve been stressing a bit over the last couple of days about trains in this country, but I think I finally get it.

Without getting a visa (see all Jess’ recent fun, for those who know her) I can only stay in the US for 90 days. When I worked it out roughly, I think the route I want to follow is probably about 120 days, which means I need to take public transport at some point. Trains in the US are pretty rare. Until last weekend, I don’t think I’d ever met anyone who’d used one. Particularly over a long distance.

Even though the train was going to take 20 hours to do just 800 miles (without any layover), which seems insane, it seemed like everything was going to be perfect. Unfortunately the station I wanted was unmanned, which meant that no one would be around to unload my bike. So I was faced with a choice. Get off 200 miles before or 100 miles after I actually wanted to, which was just a little frustrating.

However, having spent nearly 9 hours on the train, I think I get it. This isn’t a means of long distance travel. For that you drive or fly. This is just an extraordinarily picturesque tour. So far we’ve scaled the snow capped peaks of the Sierra Nevada Mountains and then watched the sun set whilst cruising the desert in Nevada. There’s even an entire lounge coach with virtually floor to ceiling windows down both sides, so you can admire the view unencumbered.

When I wake up in the morning I’ll be in Salt Lake City. No effort. No hassle. And seats that wouldn’t be out of place in premium economy on a transatlantic flight (they might be better than that, but I’ve got no experience of the higher classes). If I had more money, I could have done the whole thing with fine dining and nice wine. Instead I have some pasta I made this morning and half a bottle of red that I was given free on a wine tour the other day. The old lady running the restaurant car seems like quite the control freak though, and her frequent aggressive announcements over the PA make me think I’m definitely in the best place.

I realise I’ve jumped slightly with the trip, but I’ll catch up the rest soon. I just felt like writing about this tonight.

Andy

Books, Otis Reading and some other stuff

Sitting on the dock of the bay in San Francisco waiting for a ferry, which apparently is the bay that Otis Reading sang about, although not the dock. The dock is over on the other side. I’m also told that it was the last song he wrote before he died in a plane crash, and that the reason there is whistling at the end is that he was going to add some more lyrics. Or so said someone I met the other day. Could be complete rubbish. No idea which way the tide is going either.

Anyway, as far is this blog was concerned, I think I’m still in LA. I left after one night and took a nice scenic route through Beverly Hills to get back to the coast. In California even the people coming to rob your house are cartoon characters.

After that I had a night in Venice at a hostel that had been recommended by one of the guys that I work with. The area itself was just a mile long chain of beach front shops either selling tat or promising to- diagnose you with some condition and proscribe you weed for it. Neither exactly my thing. It was great fun for people watching though and I found a fantastically random book in a cute, and supposedly famous, book shop on the front.

The book was called “First Contact: Or, it’s later than you think. (Parrot Sketch not included)” and was buy a guy called Evan Mandary. I only read it a couple of weeks ago and I already want to start it again. I think it was the first time since I originally read the Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy series that a book made me bang my head on a table in frustration at having not seen an incredibly obvious joke coming, because the writing disguised it right up until the last second. Well worth the read.

Speaking of the Hitchhikers’ Guide, I’m just in the middle of the 6th instalment (“And Another Thing...”), which was written by Eoin Colfer, since unfortunately Douglas Adams is no longer with us. It’s been pretty good so far, albeit a little light on Arthur, but I’ll let you know more when I finish it.

Books are becoming a pretty big expense on this trip. Far more expensive than the UK. The average price for a paperback seems to be about $16.50 (or $15 plus tax), so about £12. As I’m on my own, I’m burning through about one every 4-5 days, so thank you to Brian, who I met in San Francisco and is in much the same situation, for trading.

From Venice is set off along a coast that had turned almost due west to place called Oxnard. This really shouldn’t have been a hard day’s ride, except that a gale force wind coming in off the Pacific restricted me to a maximum of 10 miles/hr turning a 3½ hour ride into a 5 hour muscle destroying one. I had a couple of nights there to rest up, as I hadn’t had a day off since I set out from San Diego. In that time I ate a huge Italian meal (enough for about 3 people), got frustrated for most of my day off that the internet in my room wasn’t working (I’d unplugged the phone to plug my laptop in and apparently it also acted as the wireless router for my room), spent a couple of hours chatting to the manager about my travels and his great advice (whilst he tried to fix my internet) and discovered Denny’s.

After Oxnard came Santa Barbara, which was a beautiful place in a picturesque setting.

Unfortunately that meant I couldn’t afford a hotel there, so I had to go a bit further along to Goleta, which is home to UC Santa Barbara. I thought I’d find a nice chilled out studenty bar to sit in and watch the basketball that was on last night. I didn’t really look at a map before setting out from the motel and just relied on directions from the girl at reception, so, after crossing a bridge over a highway (which I should have done), I turned left instead of right and ended up walking through an industrial estate for two miles before I could get back across the highway. Happy days...

Most of the ride at this point followed what’s known as El Camino Real, which is a road built by the Spanish when they were first colonising the California area. It linked a series of Missions that they were building up and down the coast from Baja California (now still part of Mexico) up to San Francisco. The distance between the missions was about a day’s ride on horseback (30 miles?), so that someone travelling up the coast had a safe place to stop every night. A number of different roads now follow the route, but they are often marked by bells at the side of the road.

The following day didn’t get much better, as the inner tube on my back wheel failed about half an hour before the end of my ride for the day. For this trip I’ve pretty much decided I can’t be bothered faffing around trying to patch these things up. I can remember all the messing about with buckets of water, pencils, sandpaper and glue from when I was a kid and for the sake of the £3 for a new tube it doesn’t seem worth the effort. I changed it in the parking lot of a fast food place. Not sure what happened to the famous American hospitality. I’ve seen some of it elsewhere, but all I got was laughed at. By this stage towns were getting a lot further apart than they had been further south, so I guess I should just be thankful that it didn’t go earlier in the day when I’d have had to change it on the side of the road with people streaming past me.

It was also the day of my first “big” climb. I have to say, I wasn’t that impressed though. My maps have some elevation plans on them, so I knew that I had to climb from pretty much sea level to 1,200ft over the course of about 2½ miles. To me that sounded like quite a lot, so I took a break for about half an hour at a truck stop at the bottom. Happily though, the climb itself really wasn’t that tough. Nothing too steep. All nice gradual gradients. I guess training in the Dales did me some good after all! Still, I know I’ve got much bigger climbs to come in Colorado...

The next day I headed off to San Luis Obispo, which is a really nice little student town slightly inland, but I think this post is long enough. At least I’m now only 1½ weeks behind reality, so I’m catching up.

Andy

San Diego to LA

Right, time for a quick burst of writing I think, because all this seems like a really long time ago. I always say with holidays, or any change of situation recently, that it hardly seems to take any time before my mind just starts to accept it as being the new normal and everything else starts to feel like some dim and distant past. Obviously when you head home...

Given that I was on a new bike, I figured that I probably shouldn’t go straight to doing massive distances on a daily basis. I settled on about 40 miles a day, which was probably 20 fewer than my plan. There were also so many places that I wanted to see that there really didn’t seem any point in rushing through.

On the second day I had to cycle across Camp Pendleton, which is a US Marine Corp base. My map directed me across it and it seemed like it was just a cycle route to avoid having to go on the freeway. When I got there it turned out to be a fairly major road, albeit with a couple of Marines checking the IDs of everyone entering and playing games to see who could come up with the most entertaining pose. It was a really desolate place, which I guess is why it was turned into a military base, but the contrast was all the greater as the rest of the coast is just one long urban sprawl.

I spent the second night in Laguna Beach in Orange County. TV had led me to expect a pretty pretentious place with lots of cool bars. I couldn’t have been more wrong. It was a completely chilled out place. It wasn’t even that good for a night out, although I did meet a few nice people and got pointed in the direction of a random roof top bar in a hotel that was great for watching the sunset. Unfortunately I didn’t appreciate quite how far away it was, so it was pretty much dark by the time I got there. The view was still amazing though. I also met a lovely girl from Louisiana, who was in town with her Aunt and had the most stereotypical accent I think I’ve ever heard.

I hadn’t bothered at all with the beach in San Diego, because the weather was just a mass of grey cloud. It’s called May Grey apparently and happens every year. Followed by June Gloom. Not exactly the year round sunshine. Something happened as I went further north though, because the weather just cleared up completely and every day was just never ending sunshine. The prospect of being able to just spend a few hours a day lying on the beach didn’t exactly increase my motivation to start cycling longer distances!!

On the third day I went through Newport Beach, which genuinely did feel like being in an episode of The O.C.

I couldn’t afford to stay though and after a couple of hours lying in the sun at Huntingdon Beach I headed into the 5,000 square mile city that is the Los Angeles area. I’ve got to say, it wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d expected.

Because I followed the coast most of the way, I spent a lot of time (probably at 100 miles over a week or so) just cruising down cycle paths across beaches. Perfect for chilling out and people watching.

(Yes, I know this photo needs cleaning up, but the best editing software on my laptop at the moment is Paint and it didn't know how to zoom out from the full size photo. Just in.)

I was going to see a band at a venue in West Hollywood, so I gathered up my guts and headed inland. I guess it must have been a pretty nice day, because there was no sign of the smog that I’d been told about, although there sure as hell were a lot of cars! Not the most bike friendly place.

In general, I’ve found the US pretty good for cycling so far. Most of the roads have really wide shoulders, so it’s like having a permanent cycle lane.

I was staying at a hostel in Hollywood, which was fun and I wandered round doing the tourist bits in the afternoon.

Nic (W), I even managed to get a photo for you.

Possibly the most embarrassing experience of my life as I tried desperately not to look like I was hanging around in the street waiting to take a photo of Audrey Hepburn’s star on the Walk of Fame. It would have been fine, but for the couple who spent what felt like half an eternity, but was probably about a minute and a half, taking photos of each other with it.

The gig was awesome. Far were amazing (http://www.myspace.com/far and http://www.antiquiet.com/features/shows/2010/05/21-far-troubadour/ ) and the venue was really cool too. I even got to have some fun getting a bus there and back. Unfortunately, by the time I got back to the hostel, everyone else had gone out, so I didn’t really get to experience much by way of LA nightlife.

Enough for tonight I think. I promise to post more photos soon. At the moment I’m about 20 miles outside San Francisco in a hostel that used to be a lighthouse, so there’s still quite a lot more to write about.