Dave rides his bike to school

Above: My first rest stop of the trip.  This store is in Lagunitas, CA, a little less than 30 miles from the Presidio in San Francisco.  I’ve actually been to this store before on training rides.  You can see my fully loaded rig in front of the store.

 

Above: Bodega Bay 

 

Thursday, 5/25 8am
Location:
38.3234 N
123.0376 W

Previous day’s mileage: about 71

Yesterday was quite a day! I stayed up until about 1:30am the night before, packing and trying to get my room cleaned up. Then, I work up at 6:30am in an effort to leave as early as possible.

At 8am, a camera crew from Tori’s TV station (Current TV) came over. They filmed me putting the last few things in my pack and hooking up the pack to my bike. Also, they interviewed me about my plans and how I was planning to keep in touch (I showed them my snazzy GPS phone and my foldable Bluetooth keyboard-which I’m using right now). Then, they filmed me riding towards the bridge, along Crissy Field. The weather was gorgeous, so I hope they got some nice footage.

Subsequently, I said my last goodbye to Tori, which was very difficult, as you can imagine. The ride across the Golden Gate Bridge was amazing, despite the fact that I’ve done it a thousand times before. San Francisco is beautiful.

Skip forward about 5 hours: I was starting to get REALLY tired, after traveling over all of the hilly terrain. My bike trailer is barely noticable ON FLAT GROUND, but on hills, it’s brutal. Well, of course, Northern California is full of hills. Anyway, at 3pm, I realized that I wouldn’t be able to make it to my planned destination of Bodega Bay, given that I had about 25 miles to go, and it was getting late. So, I decided to suck up my pride and look for a motel in the next town, Tomales. My maps indicated that there was one motel in town. As fate would have it, that one motel was closed down. ARGH! My only option was to keep going.

The next town was Valley Ford, about 7 miles away. After about 50 minutes, I reached Valley Ford (obviously I wasn’t moving very fast). Ahh! Guess what I found there… The only hotel was closed! Once again, my only option was to keep going.

The next town was Bodega Bay. Ironically, as I mentioned above, Bodega Bay was my original destination. However, given that I was exhausted, it was past 7pm, and the heavy fog was rolling in, I decided to check into an Inn, even though there are campgrounds nearby. A little disappointing, but under the cirmcumstances, I just wanted a warm bed to sleep in.

That brings me to today. The weather is again gorgeous. I took full advantage of the Breakfast Buffet (1 waffle, 2 bowls of oatmeal, 1 English muffin, and an apple for later). Today my planned destination is Anchor Bay, about 55 miles from here. My future entries aren’t likely to be this long because I’ll be running on battery power (I’m plugged in right now), but then again, I do have a solar panel, so we’ll see.

Best Wishes!

Tags: Travel

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 25th, 2006 at 9:35 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.