After four months in the Southern hemisphere enjoying summer (most of the time!), on 1st March we made a big leap on our journey homeward when we flew from Christchurch to San Francisco. Whilst the flight was an epic 13 hours long and took us all the way diagonally across the enormous Pacific Ocean, we actually arrived before we departed, with our flight landing at 6am, six hours before we left. This made for a very (very) long first day stateside. We had booked a hotel in downtown SF – turning up at 8am with our bike boxes and other gear probably wasn’t what they were expecting when we made the booking… but we managed to persuade them to store our stuff whilst we went and did some zombie sightseeing before check-in, revisiting some places we’d been before when we were last in SF in 2013. Luckily we didn’t have to wait until 3pm as advertised to get in our room, but the time until 1pm went very slowly and depressingly as we traipsed around town in intermittent heavy and cold rain wondering why we had left the summer behind so soon?! And why had we come to America exactly? At the beginning of March?
We were of course completely pooped, so after an afternoon nap, followed by takeaway burritos and a good night’s sleep we rationalised that we were just experiencing our first big ‘game change’ for a long long time, since we left Japan and arrived in Australia to be precise, four full months ago.
Early in the trip we had become accustomed to the game changing constantly as we crossed borders, changed languages, currency, food, landscapes, temperatures and cultural and social norms. We have definitely got out of practice on managing this. America hit us like a steam train on arrival – with even the common language we share feeling ‘foreign’ as Americans seemed to be challenged understanding us (especially Matt). Never mind the obvious poverty on show in the form of street homelessness, supermarket security guards with guns, dilapidated neighbourhoods alongside enormous grand houses. SF (and America in general) in our experience so far is definitely very much a land of extremes these days. We just needed to adjust.
A couple of days later (and having stopped by the best ever outdoors shop – REI Co-op, to stock up on more warm things and other essentials) we were ready to depart the big city and start our trip north. I was nervous. Yes we’d acknowledged that we just needed to ride the wave of everything feeling different all of a sudden. But this is OK when you’re just walking around a city and retreating to a hotel room at night. How would cycling in the US be?
Well. I have to confess the first day (despite the ride over the Golden Gate Bridge, and back, and then a ferry across the bay to Vallejo at the base of the Napa Valley) was quite the day. There was some bike infrastructure, but also lots of traffic, lots of massive trucks, some entire tented villages of homeless people which we found ourselves shortcutting through. And then Napa itself – a wealthy city filled with incredibly expensive wine tasting opportunities ($50 each for wine tasting is definitely not our sort of wine tasting). Gulps – was this to be our time in America? All a bit much?
The next day of cycling had some quieter sections, and some pretty riding through vineyards and up and over a couple of short climbs, but it also had a crazy busy road with no shoulder (which looked on the map like a quiet back road), a lot of cold rain, someone shouting at us from their truck (‘****ing idiots’) and endless urban sprawl. Oh dear.
After spending our first night en route in a B&B in Napa we had arranged for this second night to be spent at a WarmShower in Healdsburg; our first in a while. This turned out to be a godsend. Not only was our host Julie away for the night (so we were effectively staying in a lovely house, without her there – such a lot of trust and kindness), but she had left us soup and pumpkin loaf to enjoy. She also had an Amazon Alexa installed on her kitchen wall. Great for playing music, less good when Matt sleepily said to me “I’m totally pooped” after dinner. Alexa then cheerily announced that “poop” had been added to her next day delivery shopping list. His face was a picture, and was rapidly followed by a panicked time working out how to remove it…
We awoke the next morning refreshed and ready to brave our first taste of camping in America. The rain was meant to ease for a couple of days to be replaced by strong wind so we decided that getting to a campground and waiting out the wind with a day off to recharge would help us to get sorted and make a plan for the onward route. This turned out to be a good move, helped by a better day of riding as we left the sprawl behind heading North and a bit West towards the sea. As planned we had two nights at our first State Park campground – a beautiful but freezing cold spot amongst our first redwoods of the trip. More game changing to adapt to of course – adjusting to it getting dark early and spending hours (and hours) in our sleeping bags in the evening having managed to warm up during the day with a longer than expected hike, and a visit to a ‘hard’ apple cider stall. The campsites all had bear proof boxes at each spot, and ours somehow had three bottles of beer in it leftover from last summer. The lids were rusty, but the beer inside was good! So of course Matt then explored round the other 71 bear boxes of the deserted campsite…. alas nothing else was found.
Onwards after our day off we were feeling a bit confident about the riding and made our way to the coast and joined the official Pacific Coast route south of a beautiful old town overlooking the sea – Mendocino. We had a really lovely afternoon here. The sun came out! We walked the headlands, checked into a very dilapidated old hotel on the front which smelt very weird but was a bargain, and had dinner at an Irish bar. We felt like we were getting the hang of things!
We knew more rain was forecast for the weekend so had contacted a WarmShowers host a short way up the coast North of Fort Bragg and asked if we could stay a couple of nights. With the wet weather this turned into three very cosy nights spent in Jennifer’s ‘guest house’ – a cabin with the most amazing wood burning stove, no actual warm shower, and a composting toilet (read: bucket of sawdust). It was just what we needed – we did our laundry, caught up on more planning, blogging, phone calls etc and felt very glad to not be getting soaked in the endless rain which fell on the Sunday and Monday as forecast.
Tuesday dawned overcast but we knew we had a good weather window coming to very make much the most of, so we put foot to pedal and started what turned out to be lots and lots of consecutive days of riding heading North. The day departing Fort Bragg turned out to be beautiful along the coast, followed by a proper climb up and over Leggett Hill and down into another State Park campsite north of the town. Here we met our first other cycle tourers in America. Of course, they were Canadian (we always seem to befriend the Canadians) – Jeremy and Jesus from Vancouver who were cycling from Portland, Oregon to San Francisco. They had set off in February in the snow! It was encouraging to meet some other people who think that this is the right time of year to cycle this route…
Our next few days of riding took us along the Avenue of the Giants, and latterly a series of National and State Parks which collectively are home to some of the oldest and tallest trees in the world. They were really really beautiful and made us feel very very small. Stunning to cycle through, especially when on a quieter road like the Avenue of the Giants (running parallel to the much busier Highway 101) and admire.
The only downside being that camping amongst them whilst also awe-inspiring, a once in a lifetime experience etc etc… was really flippin’ freezing! Whilst we were enjoying some sunshine during the day the density of the canopy meant that our camping spots were never warming up – so neither were we! Cold feet and hands, and lots of time spent in down jackets and sleeping bags.
As well as the Redwoods, Humboldt County in Northern California is also home to lots of marijuana growing. These days, this is completely legal in California (and a number of other US states) but the industry has been here for a very long time. Apart from the smell, we hadn’t quite clocked this until we popped into a dispensary thinking that a dispensary is a pharmacy… to find that the only ‘medicine’ being dispensed was not what we were looking for!
The logging and dairy industries in the county have also created wealth over the years, particularly in the 19th Century – leaving a legacy of towns with incredibly grand ‘Victorian’ houses (how Americans describe them). Ferndale was a highlight as well as some of the mansions in Eureka and Arcata. Arcata itself is also a university town which made for a chilled out vibe and some very delicious beers!
And of course… there was also the Pacific Ocean to admire when the road took us close enough. Big waves, big rocky outcrops, and even bigger grey whales passing through on their annual migration – we were lucky enough to spot some at a distance. Luckily we didn’t spot any big land mammals whilst camping despite feeling the fear from all of the earning signs at the campgrounds! We did however meet a herd of Elk at a safe distance whilst riding through the Redwoods. Awe inspiring all over again.
Our last stop in California was Crescent City – a sprawling place with big beaches and a ginormous Walmart. We treated ourselves to a motel here – the famous Curly Redwood Lodge which was built from a single redwood tree. Quite the retro experience.
So what’s next – well more cycling North of course, crossing over the border into Oregon.
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