15 minutes….
It’s Saturday afternoon here at the Morro Bay public library and I have just 15 minutes to whip out a post. The pressure’s on! And so is the heat….106 degrees inland from where I am, and where I will be tomorrow afternoon. With the heat reflected off the pavement and with only 3 small towns sandwiched in between 2 big hills and no coastal breeze, tomorrow doesn’t look pretty.
My last official post was almost 2 weeks ago, the last 2 just being filler stuff to keep y’all happy. I’m taking a short rest here in Morro Bay because I just stuffed myself silly at a Chinese buffet–yep, big plate of salad, followed by fried banannas, eggroll, szechuen chicken, cashew nut chicken, fried rice, fried fish, fried wonton, fried onion rings, beef brocolli, fried sweet potato, fried chinese donut….notice a trend here? But I did cap off my gluttonous feast with honeydew, orange wedges, 2 brownies and 3 ice cream cones. And water. Yep, can’t forget that water, especially since I’ll be sweating sweating sweating for the rest of the day and tomorrow. I met up with another bicyclist yesterday who is from San Luis Obispo and he offered me a place to crash for this evening, so I only have about 20 miles to go before I get to SLO. Tomorrow is the SLO triathlon. Swimming, bicycling, and running. Let’s see….I have my bicycle. I have swim trunks. Running shoes? Don’t have those, but people run barefoot in Africa, so why can’t I??
Okay, I’m not going to do the triathlon, I have a 60 mile day tomorrow (again, in the inland 106 degree heat!), but I might look at volunteering cause I’d get a free t-shirt, water bottle and lunch BBQ–hard to pass up on that free food!
The last 3 days have been spent cycling Big Sur of highway 1. Just absolutely beautiful, but also many scary sections of cycling. Especially early in the morning when the fog stayed thick and it was almost impossible to see 100 feet in front of you. So I had my little bicycle blinker on and prayed that cars wouldn’t be going so fast that they wouldn’t see me in time. Actually, it wasn’t so much the cars I was worried about, it was the Fast & The Furious Tokyo Drift motorcycle speed demons that gave me the most worries. These weren’t the weekend Harley Davidson crew (although there were plenty of those too), these were the guys and gals with super turbo charged Kawasakis and motor Jets that scream around the curves in excess speeds, and they travel in packs of 6 or 8 and you can here them miles away. Great weekend to choose to ride Big Sur, since up north in Monterey is the US Motorcycle Racing championship or something like that. I’m still over 200 miles away from the great smog of Los Angeles, but I hope to be there by Wednesday and hopefully then I’ll be able to find another library that can offer Internet to update this blog.
But before I go, have to tell the story of the Racoons. Kirk Creek Campground, Thursday night, hiker biker site. There were 7 of us altogether. Full campground. And the nastiest breed of racoon ever engineered. Normally I just sleep out under the stars in my sleeping bag, either on the ground or on a picnic table. But on this night, after I saw a racoon swagger on over to my sleeping bag and sniff at my pillow, I decided to take no chances and promptly put up my tent. I sooo hate racoons. The next morning, much to my chargrin, one of my panniers suddenly had a tiny series of holes that those food morongers created. It could have been worse though…I spoke with a regular camper who said that 3 racoons actually got into his CAR and created a mess in there. So, to end my little tale, the message is that if you find yourself camping at Kirk Creek campground in the Big Sur area (sweet campground too by the way, I was just a few feet from the bluff’s edge of the ocean waves), Beware of those Racoons!!!
Okay, I’m outta here, hopefully with lots and lots of water for tomorrow’s ride and I hope to update again soon. Enjoy the weekend!
Tags: Travel
Administrator
So you didn’t pay up and his raccoon buddies found you? Just pay up!
The waves of racoons is the first sign of the apocalypse. Next come the locusts. I hope you packed some DEET.
kirk creek was awesome! that site had the best sunset of the entire trip! ive got you beat on the people side though, there were 8 bikers, a newlywed couple that parked there car on the road and a family? of four that parked on the road. full house, and no raccoons. i think its just you. and there were the boxes, there were boxes for your food.