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
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