Circling the U.S. Chapter 54: Losing Rob

Monday, November 11 - Wednesday, November 13

Every time I'm off the bike for several days I feel like I'm starting all over again and wonder, will I be able to ride the hills that are waiting for us? Rick made us feel so welcome and comfortable that we were tempted to stay forever. But we had an invitation for Thanksgiving dinner in San Diego, so it was time to go.

We easily got into our riding groove. Five miles from Rick's house, with a few easily managed San Franciso hills, found us back on the Adventure Cycling route heading south.

These two pictures are of Devil's Slide where a bicycle and pedestrian route bypasses the highway tunnel. Some of the bicycle/pedestrian routes we've encountered on this trip are pretty amazing. This one tops the list.

After riding 52 miles we arrived at a hostel on the property of the Pigeon Point Lighthouse in Pescadero, south of Half Moon Bay. It was pricey, at $100 for a private room, but there weren't any other options nearby. 

The hostel is part of a network called Hosteling International. It was quite nice, but the list of rules, including no alcohol, was rather daunting. Also, the website advertised a hot tub, but when we arrived we found out that it cost extra. When my shower came out cold with no hot water in sight, I asked for a free hot tub soak.

The setting was stunning. We arrived in time to enjoy the sunset, sitting outside with hot tea (not our usual beer; at least we hadn't been able to acquire any, so it wasn't a loss).

Tuesday, November 12, in the morning before getting on our bikes, we walked around the lighthouse, soaking up the views with the morning light.

The hot tub is housed behind that blue door...

...on a deck overlooking the ocean, behind the fencing. Having a cold shower as a bargaining chip worked out in our favor. The hot tub is scheduled for just a couple people at a time so we had it to ourselves with the stars overhead. It was a beautiful way to begin the next stage of our journey.

The sky was as dramatic as the ocean.

These are the buildings housing the hostel guests.

We arrived at Natural Bridges State Park, just north of Santa Cruz, by 11:00 and stopped to see the monarch butterflies that overwinter there. I think they were just beginning to arrive.

Maybe you can make out the cluster of butterflies in the tree. There were several photographers with enormous lenses and I asked to look through one of them. The detail they could get, focusing on a single butterfly, was impressive.

Then we had lunch on the beach where pelicans had made their home on the rocks just offshore.

We had beautiful riding along a bike path to Santa Cruz proper. The views were gorgeous but I was feeling saturated with beautiful ocean pictures so I didn't stop to take any.

We skipped the Santa Cruz boardwalk in favor of getting a taste of downtown. While there we had ice cream then found a bike shop right around the corner. As soon as we walked in, the young man at the counter said, "I saw you sitting on a bench eating ice cream with your backs to your bikes. I should have said somethiing then. Do not leave your bikes, even if they are locked, not even for a minute. They will get stolen."

As we were riding through town to find a Trader Joes, I noticed only one or two bikes locked up. Lots of bike racks, no bikes. What a shame. Especially for a college town. Our daughter, Kylee, applied to UC Santa Cruz. She thought it would be fun to go to a school whose mascot is the banana slug.

After being warned about all the bike thefts in Santa Cruz, we saw this bike outside Trader Joes. Obviously a kryptonite lock isn't enough.

The short days have definitely presented us with a challenge. We both want to be off the road before it gets dark. When dark comes so early we feel rushed, with no time to savor the places we ride through.

At 3:00, when we came to the quaint downtown area of Capitola, we decided to change our plans and stay at a campground just a mile or so down the road so we could enjoy the town and have a beer looking out over the waterfront and some old pastel colored condominiums. We stopped at the Paradise Beach Grille, where the hostess let us bring our bikes inside and then when we left offered us a pile of peppermints and Andes mints and the owner gave us a T-shirt.

Without a doubt one of the wonderful things about this trip is how generous and kind people are to us.

Wednesday, November 13, is the day I lost Rob. Pretty impressive that it took me over five months to do it.

We were riding along all morning at a pretty good pace, hoping to arrive in Monterey by early afternoon to have some time to sightsee. When I saw a sign for the town of Moss Landing, I stopped to wait for Rob,  thinking it would be a good place to explore and stop for lunch. I pulled off the road to where I was sure he would see me. I heard the sound of a sea lion barking, and my attention was captured by movement in the water of the marina at the side of the road. I kept checking for Rob while I also watched a sea lion surface and dive in front of me. 

Time passed and Rob didn't appear. I hadn't thought he was that far behind so I began to worry. Had he passed me by while my attention was diverted by the sea lion? Or was he still behind, broken down by the side of the road? I got back on my bike and rode back to where I thought I had last seen him, all the time worrying that he was ahead of me. I couldn't call him because my phone was out of juice.

I got to where I was sure I'd last seen him, but no Rob. I saw a county sheriff car and rode over to it. The sheriff was on the phone, his back to the window. I waited. He kept his back to me. I gave up and got back on my bike. He called me back. I explained the problem and asked if he could try calling Rob. Rob answered the phone then it disconnected. The sheriff said he'd ride ahead to see if he could find Rob while I started off in the other direction. Then the sheriff came back to tell me that another trooper had seen a cyclist back a ways on the side of the road doing a repair. I said, "Could you make sure? There are other cyclists riding the route."

He said, "You wait in the coffee shop just past the Moss Landing turnoff and I'll go check." Once inside the coffee shop, I plugged in my phone and there was a message from Rob. He'd gotten a flat tire. I started riding back to find him. The sheriff came back and told me that he'd stopped and given Rob a hand. He said Rob wanted me to hang out and wait for him but I bicycled to meet him anyway. He'd fixed his tire and was putting his panniers back on. 

Between Rob having to deal with fixing his third flat tire in six days and my panic at almost losing my husband, we decided we needed a lunch break to reset. With a shared beer. Over lunch Rob told me when his phone rang he couldn't hear for all the traffic going by so he hung up. When it rang again, he thought it was a crank call so he didn't answer.

Other than that fiasco, the day was terrific. We rode along country roads, farmland that felt like we were traveling through the produce section of a grocery store. We tried to figure out what was growing in each field as we passed by. I saw a cauliflower peaking out from under one plant. We saw random brussel sprouts on the road.

The vegetables on your dinner plate in the winter come complements of the many brown-skinned people we saw working in the fields. Keep that in mind when the president trashes the people from Mexico.

Occasionally the roads became rough with dried mud and I thought, "When it rains this is going to become slick as ice."

Brussel Sprouts

Miles and miles of plastic. Makes you wonder what happens to it when the crop is done. It's too dirty to be recycled. We think that strawberries are the main culprits using the plastic, although in the picture below there is no plastic under the plants.

Strawberries ripe for the picking. Unlike in New England where small farms leave the plants in the ground over the winter, here they plow the plants under and plant new ones. We found out that strawberries use tremendous amounts of water. California strawberries are terrible for the environment.

Farm workers picked cabbage heads and tossed them onto a conveyer belt.

Most of the time when we saw workers in the fields there were cars parked alongside the road. But here they obviously got bused in.

Artichokes

French Fried Artichokes

We passed by, thinking we'd have other opportunities to give them a try, but we didn't.

Then we came back to the coastline.

Rob pointed out the paraglider soaring off to our right. There were two of them.

The coastline just before Monterey. I love the colors.

Rob's flat was the third in six days. We figured he'd better get a new tire so that cut out any sightseeing we might have done in the afternoon after we arrived in Monterey. Instead we headed straight to a bike shop. While Rob changed his tire, I changed my handlebar tape.

Then the dark got the better of us. We had no interest in hunting down a campground on the top of a hill on the outskirts of town so we found a cheap room and stopped at a Trader Joes where we picked up some frozen food to cook in a microwave. We made plans to do come sightseeing in the morning and then bicycle to Carmel-by-the-Sea.