california-1998

We wound up travelling some 780 kilometers, with only 1700 meters of climbing or so—that’s less climb than a hard day ride around the Bay Area. It’s a trip that should be feasible for any reasonably fit cyclist. There are only a few sections with significant traffic, and nearly all of those have wide shoulders. Plus, southbound, there’s virtually no cross-traffic to deal with.

The route through Port Hueneme borders the navy base, on wide streets with moderate to heavy traffic. It’s not particularly pleasant, but it’s not very long before you get back on Highway 1 and it rejoins the coast. The traffic is fairly heavy at this point, but the road is wide and the scenery was the best we’d had since Morro Bay, so the ride was enjoyable.

We headed south along those ridiculous Southern California beaches. I wound up sucking John’s wheel most of the day. I think part of it was the route; it had turned flat, and alternated between commercial or frontage roads, and the shoulder of Highway 101, none of which makes for exciting riding.

The seediness of our surroundings made it easy to get out of the room early on Day 6. The day ahead of us promised to be the most challenging since Santa Cruz, so an early start was warranted.

We got the bikes pointed southward and took it fairly easy. The weather was decent; there was still some fog and low clouds, but it wasn’t as dreary as it had been coming south from Carmel, and the clouds burned off soon enough. South from San Simeon, Highway 1 gets straighter and flatter, so we were able to make decent time without killing ourselves. The ride is pleasant but not as scenic as the ride into San Simeon.

After another big breakfast, we got the bikes pointed south and started riding. It was still foggy and chilly, but we had a climb coming out of Big Sur that got us warmed up quick enough. On that climb we saw our first sign with mileage to LA (310 miles)

South of Carmel, the coast is largely undeveloped, so stopping places are few and far between. Consulting our altitude chart, it looked like the stretch coming up was going to be one of the more difficult ones on the coast; there are big climbs on both sides of Big Sur. Taking that into account, there appeared to be just two possible targets for the day; Big Sur, about 40 km south, and Lucia, 80 km down the road. We still had to fix my spoke, plus we still felt kinda weak, and there was at least one other side trip we wanted to take, so we decided to make this an easy day

On the advice of the motel front desk we headed out towards the beach immediately. We passed by the famed Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, and then went out onto the wharf and got a large breakfast before a long day to a lovely sunset on the beach in Carmel.

We were planning to get started before 10:00 AM, but general apathy and the few requisite last-minute problems delayed us until after 11:00. We had about 120 km to go to Santa Cruz. Because of our late start, we had to keep the pedals turning; we had only about 7 hours of daylight to work with. That, combined with the weather, kept us from taking many pictures.