We’ve been blessed with fantastic weather lately and today was no exception. It felt much warmer this morning than it had been in the past couple of mornings. We planned on taking a short 60km jaunt to Stillwater Cove State Park today as we decided to have a relaxing cycling day.
In the end we lucked out more or less weather wise down the pacific coast. We only had about 3 days of cycling in the rain. It’s rained at night but that doesn’t really bother us when we are in our tent. We had the big storm hit us in Southern Washington where we got soaked and had to spend a couple nights in a motel in Aberdeen. Then there was the second storm which was much weaker that hit us while we were at Cape Disappointment. And the third rainy day was just a few days ago when we truly got soaked as we headed towards Leggett. I don’t think we’ve been that wet in a long time. We also had a couple very foggy days in Oregon, but the rain and the fog was all expected. That’s how the Redwoods get so big! Just as an aside, I read this interesting fact about Redwoods at one of the visitor centre signs: their needles are designed to collect moisture from the mist and fog in order to cause water droplets to fall from them to their roots on the ground. Pretty neat!
We had a great ride today, with spectacular scenery the entire way. There was an incredible tail wind that pushed us South all day. It’s nice when a strong tail wind is now a regular occurrence. 🙂 In Manchester, the local market/hardware store was open so we went into replenish our food for the morning. There I finally found an appropriately sized American flag for the back of my bike. I was quite excited as I was waiting to put up the Canadian flag until I was able to get a similar sized American flag to go with it. My theory is, drivers tend to respect (ie don’t pass us going so fast so close) a touring cyclist more when they are flying a flag of their country.. I think it also might make them think that we are serious/crazy cross country cyclist and they might give us more room… or perhaps it’s just all in my head but it works for me. At worst the flapping of the flag may catch a driver’s attention.. if the big yellow panniers and their reflectors and our colourful outfit and the very blight blinking red light wasn’t enough.
In the town of Anchor Bay, we spotted a very neat looking all-electric car. I’ve noticed that there is an incredible number of hybrid vehicles on Hwy 1 in California, particularly Toyota Priuses. I think they have a big tax incentive in California for hybrid vehicles. I would guess 1 out of every 20 cars was a Hybrid on the road today.
We stopped in Gualala Regional Park for lunch. At the visitor centre the older gentlemen who was volunteering there enthusiastically showed us all the old farm equipment on display. He was very nice and his enthusiasm was incredible! It was very windy so we decided to look for a sheltered picnic table (which we eventually found, conveniently located next to a big tree to shelter us). We met a group of people, where one of the couples had done the pacific coast cycling trip many years ago. It is really incredible the number of people who have come up and talked to us who had also cycled down the pacific at some point in their lives!
We arrived at our campground with a couple hours to spare before sunset. We set up camp and relaxed a little, then headed down to the ocean to watch the waves and the sunset. It was really spectacular. I thought it was one of the most scenic spots we’ve seen on our entire trip. After the sunset we headed back to our site and cooked a really good chicken soup/stew for dinner.
On our trip, we’ve found that our appetites have grown beyond what is capable of cooking with our camping equipment. Our 4L pot is now barely big enough to feed us dinner. It was overflowing with food today, but we managed to very easily eat all of it. 2L of stew each! We also had a loaf of bread to fill us up. When we cook stir-fry our frying pan is always overflowing, and we are usually still hungry after each having seconds… We think it might be a challenge to stop eating so much when we eventually stop cycling! In the meantime we need bigger pots and pans or maybe multiple pots and multiple stoves? :p
We are currently sitting in our tent as I type this entry up. We don’t have internet here so we are not sure when we’ll eventually upload this post, but I am trying to stay on top of our blog posts from now on, as catching up ends up becoming a monumental task and many details missing (although you would probably say my entries are way too detailed that nobody reads them in their entirety anyway..). I am also hoping to catch up on the few posts we have yet to write up from Oregon (ie how we had met Rob).
They had a special hiker biker site tucked away at the Stillwater Cove State campground which was very nice, especially since the campground appears to be full. This is the first time we’ve been in a busy campground in a while, but it’s likely due to a combination of Veteran’s Day falling on a Thursday and the beautiful weather, but mainly because it’s a Saturday.
The only minor annoyance is that at the only closest site to us, there is a big family group camping and they have their 50 inch flat-screen TV hooked up right outside their RV, and they are all watching some movie and we can hear it. There is no electrical hookups at this campground so they are running this off a generator. The only upside is its keeping the group of 4 or 5 kids quiet for now. Perhaps one day that will be Katherine and I, but it seems unthinkable at the moment.
Rob was supposed to call us at the end of his day of riding today, but we have no cell reception yet again so we’ll probably have to catch up with him after he gets into San Francisco.
Tomorrow we are going to take it very slow and easy and just cycle 20miles.
Trip Around The World 
Leave a comment