We woke up in the freezing cold. Everything was covered in frost outside, and it was the coldest morning since the Rockies. Luckily the sun shown through as we ate our breakfast which kept us warm. And we thought Central California would be warm!
Despite the cold morning we had a gorgeous day of cycling. It was brilliantly sunny and we had a nice tail wind.
For lunch we stopped at a State Park, which was free to enter for us since we had arrived by bicycle (we wish Provincial Parks were more cyclist friendly!). This state park is the largest Sea Lion breeding colony in the world. The person at the front gate was very nice and suggested that since we were cycling, we probably wouldn’t want to do the 2 hour hike to go see the Sea Lions who probably weren’t there at this time of the year. He suggested other places down our route which would be better for us with our bikes. He also suggested Kirk Creek Campground, which was on our route in about 3 days. He said it has the best hiker/biker site on the entire coast!
We passed by some exciting slide areas and were glad that the highway was clear of slides (guide book mentions that the highway can be closed on a regular basis in the Spring due to land slides).
We passed through the vibrant town of Santa Cruz. There were many beautiful homes along the coast. The road along the coast was also beautiful, but we could not stop for too long as we were quickly running out of day light and still had to stop at a grocery store to replenish our food supplies.
We eventually arrived at the campground fully stocked with food after sunset. To our surprise it was the first state park that had the front gate manned with a person, and a line up of cars and RVs to get in. It was likely due to the Thanksgiving weekend. The girl at the desk said that camping during the Thanksgiving weekend is very popular and many campgrounds around the area are usually full this time of year. We had a very official check-in as we obtained official bicycle permits to tape to the front of our bikes, and we had to initial our names on a piece of paper to say that we read and agree to the special bicycle site rules. This campground is so popular that only one night stays are allowed for cyclists. We also noted that they had removed the ‘hiker’ from the hiker/biker site designation. It appears that they had been having some problems with ‘transient hitch-hiker’ people who had been taking over the sties and causing problems at the hiker/biker areas (our guidebook mentions this as a problem as we head further south). We found it interesting how they now appear to only allow cyclists.
We arrived to our site to find out that it had a beautiful view of the ocean and sunset (although the sun had already set), and it was right next to the showers and bathrooms. We set up camp as quickly as we could and started cooking dinner. The temperature was rapidly dropping. We had arrived at the campground much later than we like to, and had to cook and eat in the dark and cold. Not a fun experience but something we had to do so a number of times with the much shorter days.
To make matters worse, the showers were so cold that instead of warming us up they made us feel much colder. We have not been impressed with the consistently luke warm/cold showers of California state parks!
Trip Around The World 
Leave a comment