4 Days to LA

I don't know how much time people normally take to get to LA from Santa Cruz via bicycle, but I imagine that it's more than four days. If I were to take my time and do it for as much fun as possible, I'd probably take six or seven days, but Leo and I wanted to do it fast. As a result, the original plan was to do it in three days. That might be a little extreme. It would've involved three consecutive 120-130 mile days. It's possible, but neither of us had ever done it. A few days before leaving, we talked ourselves out of it.



Day One:
We left early on a Sunday morning, and we aimed ourselves toward King City. We had decided to take the Salinas Valley instead of the coast to expedite the trip. The first day was bit longer than it should've been and I have to take responsibility for that. First I turned us east too early - somewhere around Pajaro. I think I was remembering the route from the Surf City AIDS Ride this past year. It made me think that the (unfortunate) left we took would be a good way to get to Salinas, but maybe not. It certainly wasn't the end of the world, but it definitely added a few miles. That combined with me getting us turned around once we hit Salinas rightfully made Leo kind of grumpy. Two things led to us wandering around Salinas for entirely too long. First, Leo is far too kind to suggest to me that I am totally wrong. The second thing was that 99% of the time my sense of direction does me pretty good, therefore it never really occurred to me that I was totally turned around. Thankfully, in the interest of time, Leo risked offending me and became a little more vocal in his assertion that we were going in the wrong direction.
Once out of Salinas, everything was great. The cloud cover cleared up and we found a strong wind at our backs. We covered more ground in less time than I ever have before. We stayed on the 101 as much as we were allowed and maintained about 25 miles per hour with very little effort. It's an amazing thing to go 25 miles per hour and not feel any wind hitting you in the face, but the tail wind kept it that way for miles.
We stopped for water/snack breaks here and there, and even changed a car tire for two ladies coming back from Big Sur who insisted on giving us ten bucks (which paid for our camping a couple days later).



Just outside of King City, we turned onto Jolon Road, and that's when it happened. The tripmeter on my bike turned over to 100 miles for the day. We had both just ridden the most either of us had ever ridden. By the time we snuck up a fire road on a cattle ranch to camp, it had hit 104 miles. Nice.
Day One:
Got lost, got found, helped some people, enjoyed an amazing tailwind, biked over one hundred miles, and camped illegally. Not too bad, but as I drifted off to sleep I worried that I might wake-up in the morning to discover that I was in no physical condition to repeat it. Leo would be so disappointed and I would be incredibly embarrassed.