San Francisco to OR Border

The coast north of San Francisco is as beautiful as the coast to the south.  It is also sparsely populated and hilly, but has a greater diversity of landscapes and eventually transitions into the wet coastal forest.

Since I took a week off the bike in SF I decided to do a couple hilly 80 mile days to get back into the swing of things.   There is a good climb out of Sausalito, a fun descent down to Muir Beach, and then a Big Sur like up and down section into Stinson Beach.  The riding through the Point Reyes area is more like a rolling country road, similar to New England riding, before heading back along the ocean on the Sonoma Coast.  

The coastal prairie and rock formations on the Sonoma Coast section of Highway 1

San Diego, CA to San Francisco, CA

There is more diversity of people and place in California than any other state I have been to.  After more than 2,200 miles of riding in CA I surely waited too long for a blog post. There were too many people to talk to, too many hills to climb, and consequently too little energy left at the end of the day. 

Riding from San Diego to Santa Barbara via LA wasn't so bad, as I was warned it would be.  There was a lot of traffic on the road, some crappy industrial areas in LA, and some big commercial farm areas south of Ventura, but mostly nice beach towns with places to sit, and plenty of other cyclists on the road.  My favorite part was riding through places I previously knew only from pop culture (from La Jolla to Leo Carillo, through Laguna, Long Beach, Venice Beach, Santa Monica, Malibu).  North of Santa Barbara everything changes.  The coast is largely undeveloped and idyllic.  Hats off to CA for keeping so much of their coast in a relatively natural state. 

In Laguna I had one of my favorite long lost friend visits with Lauren, who I know from my 2 years at the University of Denver.   She arranged for me to stay at her parent's house where there was an extra bedroom, tasty food, interesting drinks, and delightful company.  Twelve years and a couple kids later Lauren has the same wonderful sense of humor and laid back personality and it didn't feel like more than a decade had passed.  

Madlen, Lauren's younger sister, gets the prize for putting the most effort into fixing me a drink.  There is not much I can't eat or drink, but despite my best effort I could not come close to finishing her concoction, which tasted like breakfast, fiery shrimp cocktail sauce, and vodka.             

 The OC Bloody Mary.  Luckily there were other beverage options, including tasty Kombucha, which Lauren's other sister, Kirsten, makes.  

El Paso, TX to San Diego, CA

 After seeing snow capped mountains in Lincoln National Forest east of Alamogordo, NM I decided to take the most southern, warm, and probably the most boring route through NM via route 9.  Route 9 parallels the US-Mexico border and is used mainly by the Border Patrol.  There really isn't any other reason to be there as far as I could tell.  There are a couple small old railroad towns, Columbus and Animas, but not much else except a couple hundred miles of dust and the desert.

The lonely, windy, dusty Route 9 through NM, just a couple miles north of Mexico.  For about 200 miles the most exciting thing is crossing the Continental Divide.  

Texas

Texas is big.  Texas gets hot, cold, windy, and remote.   Texas is hard.  I was in Texas for more than a month, logged over 1,300 miles, got sick 3 times, and of the 5 flat tires I've had since I left CT, 4 were on Texas roads.  I spent many lunch breaks sitting on guardrails, the only place to sit for miles, trying to put peanut butter into a tortilla flapping violently in the wind. Fortunately, Texas has a diversity of beautiful landscapes and many wonderful people.

I arrived in east Texas via Port Arthur and Beaumont, oil towns, and then rode on to Kingwood, a suburb north of Houston (the oil town), then to Montgomery, Carmine, and eventually to Austin.  East Texas wasn't particularly exciting, but full of kind Warmshowers hosts, which I appreciate even more after riding through west TX and camping for weeks at a time.

Riding through Beaumont I had to navigate around a sizable anti-abortion march in route to Jeff and Comeka's home.  Jeff and Comeka treated me to pizza and football playoffs, a day of rest, and to my first Tex-Mex meal.  Then on to Kingwood, which is suburban car land, and made me happy I wasn't getting any closer to Houston.  My Warmshowers host in Kingwood, Nathan, recently did a tour himself and so has hosting down to a science.  He has everything ready that a cyclist might ask for, including a little tray of extra toiletries in the bathroom labeled with a note to cyclists to help themselves, and had plenty of extra dessert.  In Montgomery I camped out at my first bike shop, Lake Conroe Cycling.  In addition to a couch, TV, dual headed shower, and hot beverages in the shop, Cindi provides an electric space heater for your tent on cold nights.

Somewhere around Kingwood I started getting a cold.  Leaving the bike shop the weather took a turn for the worse, with temps dropping throughout the day. After 75 miles of riding the scenic rolling hills to Carmine temps were in the low 30s with light rain.   No chance of fighting off that cold.  Fortunately, in Carmine there is a very special Warmshowers host.  Carol, in her mid 80s, lives alone well off the beaten path on a small piece of property by TX standards (~100 acres).  She has a barn with a bunkhouse which she has been using to host cyclists for years.  After a cold night I awoke to frozen pipes and a coating of ice on the ground.  So I spent a second night and had the pleasure of lending Carol a hand around the house. We went to a neighbor's to pick up a load of scrap wood, filled the tractors with diesel, I moved a microwave, burned some trash and kept the firewood supply coming. Carol was delighted with all we accomplished and gave me a special present. Carol is a woodworker, and carves children's names out of wood with letters that link together like a puzzle.  She carved Madeline and Lily and mailed them to Connecticut.   Reportedly, Madeline figured it out, but Lily is still working on it.

Carol on a cold morning with her mule and mine.

Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana

Mobile Bay Alabama is a transition point from beach world to industrial world.  On the ferry to Dauphin Island from Fort Morgan oil platforms are visible in all directions, and from here until TX the petro-chemical industry everywhere, above ground and below (pipelines).  I  camped underneath a beach house on Dauphin Island with the 4 other cyclists.  The beach was surprisingly nice, but I suspect the site and sounds of the oil rigs dotting the horizon keep most of the tourists in FL.

Oil rig from the Dauphin Island ferry in the Mobile Bay.