Bree starts 8th grade! This marks the 15th year of our family at the K–8 school.
Bike to school, day 19: Eureka, CA to Redcrest
This continues the stories from the long bike trip Anya and Jan began on August 14.
Today is the beginning of our ten day run to the end at Stanford — we have no rest days in our new itinerary. On the plus side, we’re now carrying less weight.
Someone has chalked a poem or story onto the bike path that leads out of town; the words go on for a mile. Sadly, it’s meant to be read going northbound.
Our point of interest for the day is Humboldt Botanical Gardens outside of Eureka. There’s a small but nice garden, a wooded trail, and an earthwork labyrinth. The labyrinth has two paths that spiral to the center, so Anya takes one and I take the other; in the middle we switch paths and spiral out. We chat with some people at the garden entrance. We’re now far enough from home that, when people ask where we started and we say Seattle, they say “Wow!”
We have grilled sandwiches at a cafe in Fortuna. From this point, Google describes the afternoon biking route as “mostly flat”, which is delightful. That’s not to say the map is the territory — the path Google picks out of town turns out to be a dirt/gravel walking path along the banks of the Eel River. At one point there’s a locked gate across the path, so we have to remove our panniers and lift our bikes over the gate.
We stop at a market in Scotia to get breakfast food for tomorrow in case nothing’s open in the morning near the cabin we’re staying at.
After Highway 101 enters Humboldt Redwoods State Park, we get off the highway and ride along the Avenue of the Giants, a beautiful road through redwoods.
Our new itinerary hinged entirely on finding a place to stay tonight somewhere near (but not in) the park, and the only place that fit the bill was a tiny set of rustic cabins next to redwoods. The only restaurant for miles in either direction is a cafe across the street. We’d confirmed that it would be open until 6:00 pm today, but when we arrive at 5:00, it’s already closed. The only food option we have is to junk food snacks from a gift store, so that’s what’s for dinner.
Bike to school, day 20: Redcrest, CA to Benbow
It’s pretty chilly when we come out of the cabin. The cafe that had been closed yesterday is at least open for breakfast — it’s just okay, and both Anya and I agree that the gray hash browns are the worst we’ve ever eaten.
Anya has two giant panniers with no interior compartments. Yesterday she bought a box of big ZipLoc bags and has happily sorted everything into see-through plastic bags so she can finally find things easily.
We’re happy that we can continue pedaling south on the amazing Avenue of the Giants instead of the highway. We stop at the Founders Grove and marvel at more mind-boggling giant redwoods.
We aim for a coffee place in Myers Flat — but we get there a bit after noon and they’ve just closed for the day. Inconsistent business hours are the theme of small towns during the pandemic. The only place to eat in town is the “market and deli”, which is just a market with some cold sandwiches in a fridge. This is disappointing, but we manage to find some edible options anyway.
The giant redwoods just keep coming. We have snacks in the little town of Miranda, then again in Redway. There’s a long downhill at the end of our day. On these downhills, Anya always zooms ahead for thrills while I ride my brakes.
Our hotel for the night, the Historic Benbow Inn, is nicer than expected. It must have been quite the place back in its heyday before someone put a giant highway next to it! Over dinner I learn that Anya never uses her bike’s front derailleur: she put the front gear on the lowest gear a while back and has just left it there.
Bike to school, day 21; Benbow, CA to Laytonville
Although the hotel restaurant served a pretty good dinner, breakfast is a sad premade take-out box.
Today’s ride will be the hardest of the trip: decent mileage, lots of elevation gain. It starts out chilly, but warms up. We’re grateful that the first miles of the day are on a country road and not Highway 101. In this section, we have flat tire #5 of the trip.
We pass through some more redwood groves, then stop at a cafe mid-morning. We enter a twisty climb on 101 that has essentially no shoulder.
We’re elated that Peg House, the restaurant we’re aiming at for lunch, is actually open. (There are no other options for miles.) Peg House is an oasis: huge patio with sun shades, yummy grill, fresh lemonade, fun vibe. A young couple eating at the next table talks to us about our trip.
It is hot in the afternoon. For some reason, today we’re seen by several cars going the other direction that make happy honks at us and wave. Curiously, motorcycle riders also give us a thumbs-up, like we’re part of some greater “bike” community.
Since there are no lodging options in this stretch of the main bike route, today we have to make a big detour to the tiny town of Laytonville to stay at a motel. We saw a taco truck on the way into town, so walk back to it for dinner. The tacos are amazing. Best discovery is chicharron — tacos filled with pork cracklings.
Back at the motel, it occurs to Anya that the big wallet she has in her pannier probably has a lot of change in it. She pours out what must be at least a pound and a half of coins — including $7 in quarters and a substantial number of Taiwanese coins.
Bike to school, day 22: Laytonville, CA to Fort Bragg
We find a coffee shop that’s open, then stop at market to pick up food for lunch — there are no restaurants along our morning route.
To finish yesterday’s detour, we head west on Branscomb Road toward the coast. The road’s in good shape, winds through farms, and after a short climb out of Laytonville, coasts gently downhill for miles. We stop for snacks in an unmarked grove of beautiful redwoods. This part of California is bone dry; every creekbed is empty.
There’s a big climb to get over the final ridge between us and the ocean. At the top, there’s a sign with a picture of a truck going downhill and the words “10% Grade Next 2.5 Miles”. Yikes! That’s really steep. We quickly drop 2000 feet. My hands ache from braking.
When we reach coastal fog, the air temperature drops by 20 degrees. We have a picnic lunch on a black sand beach looking out at rocks covered by pelicans and cormorants.
We have a terrifying panic moment after lunch: Anya’s unlocking her bike — but the lock won’t open. She tries again, I try it, no luck. If we can’t unlock her bike, we’re stuck here. We are out of cell service on a desolate bit of coast, miles from anything. It could take hours to find someone with bolt cutters to cut through the cable — and what exactly shall we tell them? “No, really, this is our bike!” We’re starting to get desperate when Anya tries setting all the combination dials one position off from the correct position. Miraculously, this works. Somehow the bike lock combination was changed while she was locking the bike. We now treat her lock with deep suspicion.
We’re now biking on California State Route 1 aka Pacific Coast Highway. Some roads have many PUDs: Pointless Ups and Downs. The afternoon’s section of SR 1 has the pudsiest PUDs: up down up down up down all the way to the small town of Cleone where we stop for snacks. We like the nice beachside bike trail through MacKerricher State Park.
We’re too tired to go far tonight, so try to ride our bikes through the drive-thru McDonalds next to our motel. The staff won’t serve us, so we have to install yet another stupid restaurant app to order curbside pickup.
Bike to school, day 23: Fort Bragg, CA to Point Arena
This should be the last of our hard days. We have drive-thru coffee and pastries before getting on California highway 1.
There’s fog off and on all day. Stopping at the side of the highway to take a breath, we’re surprised to find what we think are orchids growing wild along the road. (Later we look them up, and discover they’re broad-leafed sweat pea.)
We make our morning stop in picturesque Mendocino at the fun Good Life Bakery. On their back patio, a group asks us about our trip, remarking that we picked the best place in town to stop for a snack.
There are PUDs (pointless ups and downs) all afternoon. We stop at a roadside cafe with surprisingly good food.
At various points, California 1 travels right next to incredibly high cliffs. At some of these points, there’s no barrier, and very little ground between the shoulder and the clifftop. This is terrifying to me.
Sometimes the map shows a tight bunch of twists in the road ahead — this indicates a ridiculously steep, twisty climb up some switchbacks. At the top of one such hellish hill, I chat with a motorcyclist taking a break. He expresses sympathy for us having to slog our way up the hill. He says that he’s a trucker that works this stretch of the coast, and he’s very familiar with all the steep, twisty parts. “Is this the worst hill?” I ask hopefully. “Oh”, he laughs, “No!”
Our rental cottage in Point Arena is old and quaint. The tiny town has a pizzeria that appears to be open for business, although it’s down at the port, about a mile away down a long road. There’s an hour wait for pizza, but it’s not like there are other options, so we order one. It’s worth the wait, easily the best pizza we’ve eaten on this trip.
Bike to school, day 24: Point Arena, CA to Timber Cove
The air is foggy and freezing when we leave the little rental cottage in search of food. We’re grateful that the Point Arena Market is open.
Even though we have less mileage to travel today, there are hills to climb all day. There has yet to be a single day where we’ve finished our ride and said, “That was easy”.
We pull over by the picnic tables in front of the closed Stewarts Point Store to snack and — why not — take a nap. For the entire time we’re there, every minute or so a car or group of motorcycles 8pulls in, then someone sees the “Closed” sign and exclaims “Oh, no!”
On a bike, you can smell the fragrance of eucalyptus groves when you pass through them.
We stop in at Salt Point State Park and ask the ranger in the little entrance booth if there’s a restroom we can use. We follow his directions, which turn out to require coasting all the way to the bottom of a big hill that we must laboriously pedal back up.
On backpacking trips, I carry a large supply of energy bars and gels that are purchased over the internet and contain someone’s idea of the perfect nutritional balance for sustained athletic activity. On this trip, I have to settle for whatever I can find in gas station mini-marts, so I’m eating a lot of Snickers, PayDay bars, and Sour Patch kids.
Our hotel for the night is quite nice — the nicest we’ve stayed in for a while. A funny hotel touch is that each room contains a record player, and the lobby has a large library of vinyl records to borrow. Anya loves the record player, but we can only get it to play one song, and can’t figure out how to make it work again.
I’m in bed when I decide to open the window — and notice that it’s an incredibly clear night. I get dressed again, and Anya and I go outside to stargaze for a while. It’s been a while since I’ve been able to see the Milky Way.
Bike to school, day 25: Timber Cove, CA to Bodega Bay
This morning’s road is absolutely pudtastic as it crawls up over headlands and immediately dips down to the subsequent creeks. There is more clifftop riding to freak me out as well.
How come I’d never heard that in the 1800s Russia had a small settlement in California? Today’s tourist stop is the completely fascinating Fort Ross State Park, on the site of a Russian outpost from 1812-1841. The park’s wooden buildings have a dusty smell that reminds me of a great uncle’s farmhouse I used to visit as a kid.
We see on the map that there’s a crazy section at Russian Gulch Creek with multiple tight switchbacks. This turns out to be almost entirely down (thank god), but is still freaky to ride down.
When we reach the mouth of the Russian River, we stop to look at a beach full of pelicans. In the estuary, we can see a couple of seals and a shark.
A nondescript little market in Jenner has homemade samosas, which are delicious.
Anya’s front disc brake starts making mysterious squeaking noises again, no idea why. Since we’re only a few miles from the end of the day, she just bikes with a squeaky brake.
Our stop for the evening is at an upscale resort (it just happened to fit our mileage plan, honest!) that has a nice view of Bodega Bay. When we arrive at the hotel, a Backroads bike tour group has just checked in. A very nice woman who helps run the tour asks us about our ride and offers us cold sodas. I’d booked a massage at the resort’s spa, and it feels great. I wish I could get a massage at the end of every day’s ride.
Anya and I are both hungry at 4:00 in the afternoon, so go down to a little lounge in search of food, end up eating dinner #1. A few hours later, we go back down and eat dinner #2.
We start a YouTube video on how to adjust disc brakes, planning to follow along as the video goes. “Step One: Begin by taking the wheel off and reseating it to ensure it’s seated properly.” We pause the video to do this — and are stunned when this step alone completely fixes the problem.
Bike to school, day 26: Bodega Bay, CA to Point Reyes Station
As soon we start heading inland away from the bay, the temperature soars.
The elderly woman tending the cashier at Valley Ford Market looks down at the two piles of candy we’ve placed on the counter, then she looks back at us. “You two going to the movies?” Outside the market, we chat with a biker who also started in Seattle but is going all the way to San Diego.
There’s a bit of a climb, then we coast down to good sandwiches from the deli in Tomales. We have a headwind, but we have beautiful scenery all the way to Tomales Bay.
The road along the eastern shore of Tomales Bay is blissfully flat. While snacking on the side of the bay, an RV pulls over. The driver gets out and says that he’s passed us a couple of times, so he’d wanted to say hello. He’s providing support for two friends who are biking along the coast, and offers us sodas. Although he hasn’t done a long bike trip, he tells us a bit about a kayaking trip he did once down the entire length of the Mississippi River.
Our stop for the night is a bed and breakfast in Point Reyes Station. We ask the owner about dining options, and he says there are several restaurants in town. According to Google, the town has 6 restaurants. Of those, only 2 are open for dinner. Upon walking to both restaurants, we discover that the total number of restaurants in town actually open for dinner is 0.
So it’s another dinner cobbled together at a supermarket. Thankfully, the market has some fairly good options.
Bike to school, day 27: Point Reyes Station, CA to San Francisco
Our bed and breakfast isn’t really strong on the “breakfast” part, so we go back into town. Happily, the Bovine Bakery is open and has yummy coffee and pastries.
We take our breakfast to an adjacent lot and sit down to eat. A number of birds approach to look for handouts. One kind of black bird has a particularly intense gaze — Google says they’re Brewer’s blackbirds. I take dozens of pictures of one trying to capture the gaze. When I finally succeed, Anya likes the result so much that, when I’m not looking, she makes the bird photo my phone background. Now every time I pick up my phone, I’m a little startled.
We have an unexpectedly easy and pleasant morning ride up to and through Samuel Taylor State Park. We were expecting some elevation gain, but it’s so gradual that we’re surprised when we realize we’re through it.
We stop at a roadside fruit stand with yummy peaches and nectarines. They gift us some white nectarines and a couple of cucumbers for good measure. We have sausages for lunch from Gestalt Haus in Fairfax, per a recommendation from Chris.
When people ask us where we’re going, our destination in the South Bay Area is no longer impressive. We have to prod them a bit to ask where we started. Then they say, “Oooh!”
The afternoon’s riding is, happily, mostly on bike trails. We pass through pretty marshes north of Sausalito. On this trip, we thought we’d probably stop often for ice cream, but we’ve passed very few (open) ice cream stands. We’re happy that the Lappert’s Ice Cream in Sausalito is open.
It’s fun to finally see the Golden Gate Bridge. Just before getting on the bridge, we meet up again with the biker from yesterday heading to San Diego. It’s very, very windy on the bridge.
It feels really weird to bike into San Francisco and pass places I’ve been to on previous trips — we somehow got here from our house!? We have dinner at a yakiniku grill across the street from our hotel — the first time we’ve been able to enjoy a Korean BBQ-style meal since the pandemic began.
Bike to school, day 28: San Francisco, CA to Stanford University
Finally, our last day is here. We start with tasty coffee from Blue Bottle. Today’s tourist stop at the Museum of Craft and Design is a little disappointing because the museum’s pretty small, and the single exhibit is a modest fashion display.
Much of the morning ride is through grim light industrial areas and on roads in terrible condition. There’s some light mist: the first precipitation we’ve had in three weeks.
Our first lunch is at a tiny but awesome Brazilian cafe, where I get to try coxinhas for a second time.
It feels distinctly weird to bike through the grounds of the San Francisco airport. The area immediately south of the airport is surprisingly nice, with a bike trail by a wetland. There we have flat tire #6 of the trip.
A really nice bike trail takes us to a marina, where we hit a “Trail Closed” barrier and have to backtrack. It’s at that point that the patched tire I used to fix flat tire #6 becomes flat tire #7 of the trip. From there, we pedal alongside the giant wall next to the CalTrain tracks.
Our second lunch is at a taqueria in San Mateo is also tasty. We eventually get on University Avenue in Palo Alto, which takes us to Palm Drive and the Stanford campus. We arrive at the main quad by Memorial Church and take celebratory photos before heading to our hotel.
Our final hair-raising moment of the trip is a left turn onto busy El Camino Real — I fail to notice there are two left-turn lanes, putting us into the leftmost lane of El Camino Real surrounded by traffic. Miraculously, the puzzled drivers behind and to our right let us get over to the side of the road without incident.
We arrive safely at our hotel, bringing our bike journey of 1000 miles to an end.
Bike to school, epilogue
After a long adventure like the bike trip, I like to recognize everything that went right:
Anya moves into her dorm on Stanford’s campus to begin her freshman year.
Our summer guest, Evrim, heads home to Turkey. She graduated from Choate in June, and is taking a gap year before starting at Brown next fall. Liya’s hoping to make the short trip from New Haven to Providence to visit Evrim once she’s there.
In the evening, we set the table for just three people. *sniff*
Backyard asters
Angela is officially installed as the pastor at Community Presbyterian Church in Buckley, WA. All aspects of the afternoon service are conducted by pastors with connections to Angela. Her good friend, Eliana, delivers the sermon.
Mojo squeezes into the little cat tent that he and his brother, Moxie, used to be able to fit into at the same time.