Author: amy

We spent the last several weeks on a Grand Pacific Coast Adventure: traveling from San Diego to Seattle by bike, train, and plane. This is post 4 of 4 about that trip.

Our final stop on the west coast was Seattle. We booked our plane tickets from Seattle to Tokyo, which gave us an excellent excuse to visit more of our friends in the Pacific Northwest. We spent a fun weekend with our friends Nic, Leah, Santiago and Krista, alternating between brunch, bars, and board games. It was a great break from preparing for our next trip!

We spent the last several weeks on a Grand Pacific Coast Adventure: traveling from San Diego to Seattle by bike, train, and plane. This is post 3 of 4 about that trip.

Feeling recuperated, we took the train from San Luis Obispo to San Jose. We thought it would be appropriate, given our backgrounds, to ride through Silicon Valley on our way up to San Francisco. I found the valley simultaneously under- and overwhelming: all these companies and power in one place, but that place just happens to be a cluster of suburban office parks!

In San Francisco, we stayed with our college friend Katherine and her two roommates, Maggie and Buro. We spent that weekend catching up with Katherine, including taking a long, scenic ride through the city, and visiting many of our other friends who live in the area. Seeing so many people we knew, and staying put for a whole week, made me feel at home in San Francisco.

I’ve been thinking a lot about baking lately – a side effect of neglected hobbies and burning a whole lot of carbohydrates – so I signed up for a course at the San Francisco Baking Insitute. I spent the rest of the week on bakers’ hours, waking up early to make it to “bread school” by 7 AM. Every afternoon, I came home with an armload of bread to share with everyone. I had a blast scratching my baking itch, and using my mind and body in a completely different ways than usual.

 

 

We spent the last several weeks on a Grand Pacific Coast Adventure: traveling from San Diego to Seattle by bike, train, and plane. This is post 2 of 4 about that trip.

From Los Angeles, we took Amtrak to San Luis Obispo. We heard it was a relaxed college town and close to the beach, so we thought it would be a good place to spend a quiet week. We ended up spending most of our time there watching Netflix, instead of doing much beach-bumming or shopping, but it was just what we needed.

 

We spent the last several weeks on a Grand Pacific Coast Adventure: traveling from San Diego to Seattle by bike, train, and plane. This is post 1 of 4 about that trip.

We spent the first week of our Pacific Coast trip riding from San Diego to Los Angeles, along the scenic coastline of Southern California. That weekend, we visited my friend Meg, her husband Josh, and their preternaturally large cats in Santa Monica. We said we wanted to eat, drink and explore the city a little bit, and they delivered in spades: hitting a few major city highlights, stuffing our faces, and whiling away a few evenings with cocktails and music.

On Thursday, February 22nd, we reached the end of the Southern Tier in San Diego!

California kept us challenged all the way to the end. We spent two days crossing the Jacumba Mountains, with over 7,000′ of elevation gain, freezing temperatures, and even a little (admittedly mild) hail. In our final approach to San Diego, a stiff wind and cold rain tried to push us backwards, away from the ocean.

The end of our route led us down the Ocean Beach bike path. As we approached, the weather cleared, and suddenly the Pacific opened up in front of us. There was a magnificent sunset behind dark clouds and even a bit of rainbow. It struck me with a lot of finality – this was the end of the road. The ocean provided sufficiently dramatic bookends for such a trip. Seeing water, after all our time in the desert, definitely stirred some emotions: elation, and surprise.

We’re both still processing what this means to us. It was strange to feel directionless after so long: we’ve been simply going “south” or “west” for months. We were very fortunate to have a soft landing in San Diego with Kathleen, the mother of our friend JP.  She took us around the city and her old neighborhood of La Jolla, and spent a lot of time talking with us about our ideas and plans. Through those long conversations, she helped provide the insight that allowed us to move forward past our indecisive haze.

We’ve booked plane tickets to Japan, from Seattle to Tokyo, in late March. This gives us an excuse to travel north and explore the West Coast. We’re planning on stringing together a combination of Amtrak travel and bike touring. Today we’re leaving San Diego and riding a few days north to LA. I’m really looking forward to planning our trip to Japan, as well as seeing everyone we know on this side of the country!

 

We joked at the beginning of this trip that, like the ship of Theseus, we’d slowly repair our bikes with cheap Walmart parts and ride into San Diego on a pair of Huffys. While that hasn’t quite come to pass, a series of unfortunate mechanical issues have forced us to take several breaks. Jim’s rear tire wore down to the pink inner rubber.  My rear tire developed a large visible hole, which we booted with a dollar bill. We ran out of patches right before my rim tape, old and brittle, began sawing through tubes. Several trips to Walmart later, we now have two weirdly supple replacement rear tires; a wheel lined with ACE bandage tape; and a pile of slightly ill-fitting spare tubes.

Since we left Phoenix, I’ve been daydreaming how exactly we’d celebrate in San Diego. The first few mechanical issues left me frustrated – each was an obstacle delaying me from my victory burrito on Ocean Beach. But by the third flat, I just started laughing. I realized that anticipation was the wrong state of mind. When you’re trying to get somewhere, every delay is something to be angry about. But if you look at it sideways, it’s still the same trip. How can I be mad that I’m stuck in beautiful Southern California, and I get to dawdle here even more?

The terrain has been varied, which is a delight to me after a month of repetitive desert. We crossed the Colorado river, passed through farmland, climbed the foothills of the Chocolate Mountains, rode up and down the Algodones dunes, and descended into the Imperial Valley. The first thing I noticed was the smells. A few hundred feet below sea level, the air here is humid, and smells thickly like plants or, less pleasantly, like the cattle feedlots dotting the area.

Rural California reminds me more of the rest of rural America than it does of coastal California. I’ve always enjoyed agricultural areas, for the produce, green terrain, and friendly people. We enjoyed a rollicking stay in Blythe at the B&B Bait Shop, sharing beers and gigantic chili dogs with the regulars and two eastbound cyclists just beginning their ride.

These women had just completed what we’re facing: the big climbs between the Imperial Valley and San Diego. Meeting them made me reflect on how we must have changed over the course of this trip. I feel more relaxed – certainly I’m less upset by our bike issues than I might have been five months ago. I wonder if we’ll be changed at all by reaching San Diego, which has been a distant goal for so long.

We see many different small towns, but I’m always surprised that one can be dying, the next will be healthy, and the third will be hyper-gentrified. I’ve been reading a lot about urban planning lately. First was the classic Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs. Phoenix exemplified what she calls a “smeared” city. Phoenix, and its many suburbs, form a gigantic, low density continuum. It took us three and a half days of riding to clear the subdivisions before we re-entered undeveloped desert. The copy-pasted repetitiveness of Phoenix made it exhausting to ride through.

In a magnificent coincidence, my aunt and uncle were visiting Phoenix on business. We took two days off to visit with them, including a day trip up to Sedona, where we saw the famous red rock region. It was nice to take a break and be chauffeured for a change. On our last night together, we ended up eating at Grimaldi’s. There was a funny circularity to it: they had always said to try it in Brooklyn, but somehow we end up  together at a sublicensed “Grimaldi’s” across the country.

Well fed and rested, for the last few days we’ve been on a tear across the remainder of Arizona. We spent a night in Aguila with Phyllis and Randy, generous Warmshowers hosts whose lifestyle was an interesting rebuttal to the golf-centric 55+ communities of Phoenix. They lived in a community for retired pilots, where every house had a hangar and the main street is a runway. Jim and I both were mesmerized hearing about the technicalities and thrills of glider piloting.

Otherwise, the southwest is beautiful, but I’m bored of staring at creosote and sand. Tomorrow we’ll enter California. I’m looking forward to seeing the Mojave dunes and, of course, the Pacific.

I was expecting cartoon cacti, with two neat, evenly spaced arms. Real saguaros have so much more personality.

“So, Gandalf, you try to lead them over Caradhras. And if that fails, where then will you go? If the mountain defeats you, will you risk a more dangerous road?”
– Saruman

We are proud (and tired) to announce that we made it over Emory Pass! At 8,228 feet, it is the highest point on the Southern Tier. The pass was one of the ride-enders we’ve been worried about – our map advises you not to ride it in winter. Apparently this year has been hot and dry, so the pass was clear, but we still saw snow, frozen waterfalls, and a lot of warning signs like “ICY” and “UNPLOWED”.

We assuaged our anxieties by deciding to conquer the mountain with garbage calories. We brought a package of marranitos, some hostess cupcakes, chili mango candy, and two boxes of off-brand pop tarts. I’m sure, metabolically, that the third pop-tart isn’t doing much, but the sugar provided the psychological boost we needed to keep grinding.

Riding over the pass was just like riding over a very big, very long hill, which happens to have vertiginous views and its own micro climate. I was happy to discover that my legs and bike handling skills were enough. I even enjoyed the winding descent, which was fun, not the terrifying ride I had built it up to be. The hardest part of the day was actually the extra 1,000′ foot climb out of the Mimbres river valley at the foot of the mountain, in late afternoon on tired legs.

We still have many miles, and other mountains, between us and San Diego, but I’m just starting to feel like we might actually make it.