Flat tires to date: 9 (Jeff - 4, Keenan - 5)
Most cyclists we've shared a campsite with for one night: 17
Number of days with California sunshine: 10
Days on the road to date: 47
After finishing our last post telling you all how often we check our email, we finally have internet access, 9 days later. But what a great 9 days they have been. We finally found the California sunshine, and have enjoyed an incredible time biking along a beautiful coastline. Before emerging on the coast, we rode our bikes along the Avenue of the Giants, getting a chance to really appreciate the enormity of the Redwoods. We enjoyed cycling through scenic byways with little traffic, and just had a lot of fun biking through the forest. It's a neat place.
After climbing a few long winding hills we made a fast, brake-burning decent and emerged along an amazing coastline, with a much-appreciated tailwind. The coast in California has been amazing so far. I don't know that we have enough adjectives to describe how nice it's been. Day after day we've followed Highway 1 along the coast, clinging to cliffs (often with no shoulder), and climbed and descended so much that at the end of the day our trip climb looks as if we're back in the Rockies. It's been tiring, but it's hard to complain when the scenery around us is so beautiful.
Over the past couple of weeks we've ran into quite a few cyclists making their way down the coast. After the massive storm in Oregon we had thought that we would have fallen behind so many of the bikers that we had met. It turned out, however, that nobody made any progress during those days, with everybody that we met finding a motel room to weather out the storm indoors. So, we ended up running into so many people again, and with the limited campgrounds available the closer we got to San Francisco, we all ended up cycling to the same daily destinations. It became like "The Amazing Race", with most of us in teams of two, riding off each morning from the same starting point, and eventually meeting up that night at the checkpoint to camp out. We would exchange stories from the day, and usually build a campfire to share. We had a great time with all these really cool cyclists, and we're hoping to be able to stay in touch with everybody. Jim, one of the cyclists that we met, has a website we should share: www.bigdummyproject.com. He's a great guy, with a cool story. He was once 420 lbs, had diabetes, but decided to do something to change his life. Now, he's biking across America raising money for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. Check it out. He mentioned us a few times in his blog, so we thought it's about time to do the same.
Tuesday afternoon we made our way through the suburbs of Marin County, eventually making our way to the San Francisco Bay. After navigating through residential streets, following bike signs and many helpful cyclists and motorists, we eventually caught sight of the blue ocean, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the city of San Francisco in the distance. It was a spectacular sight, and it really felt amazing to reach this milestone. We know we still have a very long way to go - but we have to say, we do feel great about riding our bikes from our house to San Francisco.
We know we didn't finish a whole state, but we thought we'd give Northern California their own photo album. We just saw too many miles of amazing sights. Check them out here. Also, if you're on Facebook and haven't joined our group yet ("Keenan and Jeff's - ride for HOPE"), we've been trying to update that with a few more photos that we haven't put on our online album. A little behind the scenes look at ride for HOPE.
Thanks for following us along, and thank you to everybody who has emailed us this past week. We'll do our best to get on those replies. It's so encouraging to hear from so many of you - thank you so much. Feel free to keep them coming! We love to hear from you!
3 comments:
you guys are looking bearded and glorious I must say.
Well thank you very much. Our mother doesn't seem to approve of the look, but we found it much easier than shaving. We'll see how we look by Christmas and make a decision about whether to continue with the non-shaving/caveman look, or if we'll clean ourselves up for Central America.
Id like to think that the beards will be well received in entral america.
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