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.