San Diego 9 March

John and I are beginning our second coast to coast bicycle ride tomorrow morning, 10 March.  We plan to finish on 30 April. We are riding with (cringe) Bubba's Pampered Pedalers from San Diego to St. Augustine, Florida. There are 35 riders and 12 staff. It is a tent ride (mostly) with on-site cooking (mostly). Bubba's staff sets up the tents and breaks them down again-- we will have a cot, an air mattress, a chair, a towel but sadly no toilet.

At the introductory session we met Crash, Flash, Clutch, Sunshine, Snowflake, WEB, NBC, Bebe, Gogo, Gigi, Gaga (me), many others temporarily forgotten, and of course, Bubba! By Bubba's decree everyone must have a nickname sooner or later-- I offered my "grandma" name in a preemptive strike hoping to avoid something worse. One guy is called "Batteries" because his first and last names begin with "A". Another is called NBC because his last name is Peacock!

Bubba was a policeman for 28 years and is very safety conscious but we weren't required to have a doctor's okay for the trip, and didn't need to sign a vow not to do various bad things (on our 2010 trip we had to promise never to drink while riding and never to make rude gestures toward drivers, among a long list of other no-nos). He also never mentioned listening to music and while I don't make a habit of it, I like to think that one earphone discreetly hidden in my right ear is a handy Plan B if the miles of desert start to get me down. Speaking of which I have discovered that I now hear absolutely nothing in my left ear. Strange how these things sneak up on one.

We had an amazingly good trip out here thanks to an upgrade to first class and a lovely flight attendant (gay, male, very funny) who instinctively knew that things go better with gin. We got a personal tour around San Diego with our friend fron the ABB ride, Phillip White who lives here, took a couple of great bike rides and spent an afternoon at the San Diego Zoo. Tomorrow we leave San Diego on a short but somewhat uphill ride to the ominously named town of Alpine, California.

Days 1 & 2: San Diego to Boulevard, California

Two days of riding are now behind us-- I was so exhausted last night that I conked out right after dinner but there was no wifi at the campground and limited facilities for getting all the phones, garmins, cameras, iTouchs, ipads, and etc. charged,  so I didnt even try to do a new post.  Yesterday was an incredibly tough day what with lots of traffic getting out of San Diego and some absolutely interminable climbs to get us from sea level to 3000 feet.  Today was supposed to be worse but I didn't find it so---I have a new bike computer that tells me the degree of the grade so this year I have been obsessing about grade rather than mileage-- most of the climb yesterday was 5 - 8 % with one bit going up to 18%-- I walked!  Walked again very briefly this morning when it got very steep again but then my computer ran out of power so I just climbed and climbed and climbed some more without knowing how steep it was.

Now, as last night, we are at a campground on an Indian reservation.  Last night we ate at a casino buffet-- my most hated kind of dinner-- all you can eat but fortunately I didn't feel like eating much.  Tonight the staff is cooking here at the campground.  The good bits?  Usually a very good shoulder, often marked as a bike path-- some stretches badly cracked but still wide enough.  The weather has been brilliant-- very cold at night and now at 5 pm  but very pleasant for riding.  Very few dead animals on the road-- one bird, one snake in two days, only two lost and orphaned gloves, one yesterday, one today.  Motel was seedy and campgrounds very sketchy-- our tents chock-a-block but plenty of people snoring so one need not feel like a pariah.  Went out to the portapotty four times last night but at this place you must turn the brass knob to the left, punch in three numbers and turn the knob to the right so I am giving up straight away and heading for the woods.  The scenery?  Pretty good and sometimes spectacular in a very non-New England way-- lots of hills with lots of rocks and lots of sandy stone.  Daffodils are in bloom, trees in bud, and lots of other flowers including huge swaths of purple ground phlox.

Day 3 - Calexico California

Picture is of the border fence between California and Mexico.  Border patrol may be the biggest industry around here-- yesterday we passed a Border Patrol station where hundreds of vehicles were parked (I guess nobody tries to sneak in on Sunday) and today about every other thing that passed in either direction was BP, not to mention the several trucks parked out in the desert.  At one of our SAG stops we were all peeing behind little bushes while men with binoculars perched up on the ridge-- hopefully looking in the Mexico direction.

As a skilled complainer with years of practice I have the ability to switch almost instantly from whining about the endless climbing to bitching about the endless flat and my skills were put to the test today.  We started out with a climb (yes, back up the hill we rode down at the end of yesterday's ride) then had a nice few miles on "Historic Old Route 80" to a town called  Jacumba.  There we got  to Interstate 8 and had an incredible ten mile downhill-- not the terrifying kind but down, down, down, through an unearthly landscape of tumbled rocks.  There, halfway through the ride, ended our fun.  We were in a "town" called Ocotillo where we had lunch-- (Fountain Drinks - Motorcycle Parts), then into the Yuha Desert for many miles.  Totally uninhabited--it must be federal land-- I wondered why there was nothing dead on the road and finally realized that there is nothing alive off the road except Border Patrol..  Eventually we passed through the desert and into flat agricultural county with irrigation and lots of onions-- it is easy to identify them because of the odor.    Shoulder good, headwind bad, scenery pretty strange-- I got through thirty miles of it with the help of my iTunes--  nobody running this ride seems to know or care if we use earphones and there are no staff riders to monitor our behavior.

 Tonight we are sleeping in a church-- literally in the sanctuary with mattresses lining the aisles.  Our showers were in the minister's home-- three blocks away with two showers for 46 people but since I missed mine yesterday I was determined to get one today and succeeded.  I hope Bubba is giving this church a lot of money!    I had my first fall today-- as always because I was clipped in.  Started to think I had missed the church (I had) and while I was thinking about turning around I slowed so much that I tipped over right into the street-- very embarassing  but no injury.  Unlike one of the Bubba's staff...Sunshine fell off the truck this afternoon and broke her arm in two places.    

 

Day 4 - Goodbye California, Hello Arizona

San Diego to St. Augustine-- so easy to say, so hard to ride!  I keep telling myself that it is the journey that matters, not the destination, that one should savor the experience... smell the roses, as they say.  But where are the roses??? Not to be found anywhere today as you can see from the picture.  We rode through about fifty miles of this and another ten miles of the worst of city thoroughfares-- 16th Avenue in Yuma, Arizona.  Fortunately I am now clean, resting comfortably outside of a Dos Equis and for some reason cheerful about the whole thing.

Today we rode for about 24 miles on Route 98 in California, then a dozen miles on Interstate 8-- the shoulders were great and we buzzed along nicely.  Then it was off the highway and onto "Center of the World Road", a four mile stretch that I thought was the worst road I had ever bicycled-- then two more miles on I8 and off again onto a five mile stretch that was much worse than the first one.  John's water bottle actually bounced out (although he did not realize it at the time).  Turns out that California permits cyclists on the interstate where there is no alternate route and forces them off whenever possible.  Sadly the alternate routes are not maintained-- they give you the idea of what the country will look like when there are no more humans-- or perhaps like the roads around Chernobyl in a documentary that John and I watched.  Very strange.

But speaking of strange...we had lunch at the Center of the World in Felicity, California (population 280) a place that has been officially designated as the C of the W.  They have a piece of the original spiral stairs from the Eiffel Tower, a pyramid that covers the official Center and an ongoing project to carve the history of the world in granite.  The project is designed never to be completed-- they have finished the histories of California and Arizona but plan to do all the states and foreign countries-- they have the history of aviation and for some reason the history of the French Foreign Legion-- all quite beautifully done in polished red granite.  We paid $5 for the tour but I can only assume that there is some real money behind the project as well as some one with a passion for the plan...it is super engineered to outlast the human race, for e.g.  We got to put our foot on the "Center", make a wish, and got a certificate proving that we were there.

Day 5: Yuma to Dateland

Slept in a Parks and Recreation facility in Yuma and although we were in a huge room lined with our mattresses  it was remarkably pleasant.  You can see that John was very comfortable.  We had a taco dinner that was a big hit but more on that later.  After dinner the local historian came and gave a very interesting slide show about the history of Yuma.  In the morning it became known that several people were ill-- John had had a terrible night throwing up and etc.  He wanted to ride despite feeling bad but got a slow start so I spent the first several miles (horrible road, heavy traffic) in a state of some anxiety about him.  He finally caught up and we had the only nice miles of the trip-- through the "salad bowl" of the U.S.  Ninety % of all lettuce grown in the country is grown in Yuma-- lots of other veggies as well-- Unfortunately that was only twelve miles of the seventy some I rode--and John was so weak and miserable that he had to SAG starting at mile 24.  So I was really on my own through fifty miles of uninspiring country.  I managed it with the help of my iTouch and John Irving's "Prayer for Owen Meany" -- it kept me going for a long time until we had to get on Interstate 8 and I decided that I should quit listening to the book and start listening for trucks that threatened to run me off the road.  Finally we arrived at "Dateland" which is really just a highway interchange where they sell "world famous" date shakes.  Our campground was sandwiched between the Interstate and a heavily used freight train line but such is our exhaustion that we slept very well.

These guys were cutting iceberg lettuce and taking off the outer leaves with a machete.  The heads were tossed onto the conveyor belt where a woman came along and put them into plastic bags, then into cartons.  The whole huge machine was slowly moving along the field.

Day 6: Dateland to Gila Bend

This is the only picture I took today!   But it was a reasonable day all things considered.  Considering that for obscure and poorly understood reasons we are cycling many miles through the hot, dry, dusty, and basically very boring Arizona desert.  Last night's sunset was pretty but other than that I have yet to get the beautiful part of this landscape.

We have all gone from dreading the interstate to hoping that we get to ride on it.  On the frontage roads we bump and jounce around unmercifully-- on the interstate we have a wide and smooth passage that would seem like a lovely bike lane if it weren't for the 75 mile an hour speed limit and the scores of huge trucks passing by.  Fortunately we had only 53 miles to ride and there were none of Bubba's surprise extra miles-- we had about five extras yesterday.  John is feeling better and rode all the way today-- I amused myself by watching for the astonishing number of nuts, bolts, screws, nails, tacks, D rings, S hooks and etc, that end up on the shoulder of the interstate---today I even saw a wrench.  Could not listen to Owen Meany because the Interstate is too noisy and the frontage roads are too bumpy.  In Gila Bend we found our first Dairy Queen and really, does life get any better than that?

Day 6: A few bits and pieces

"Sunshine" the woman who fell off the truck fractured her arm in two places.  Fortunately there was a hospital in Calexico and even more fortunately she had a brother living in San Diego who was able to come and get her.  She is planning to meet us at the end in Florida.

John's nickname was "No Girth"-- don't ask and no-one uses it.  In fact, the nickname thing has pretty much gone out the window-- it just doesn't work with a group this big.  Bubba tried to christen Scott Bean as "Pork'n" , then "Refried" but neither took hold and Scott is just Scott.  He is greatly relieved.

Our "Minister of Liquid Refreshment"  (DHB for Downhill Bob) is stuck somewhere on the road so has not yet joined the trip.  Whoever is substituting for him is no connoisseur of beer and wine.  The first option was Bud Lite (you are right Steve, almost no-one would drink it) and two  boxes of wine "Sweet Chardonnay" and "Sweet Merlot" (whatever they are!).  In the past couple of days we have had Dos Equis, however, and that is well received.