Despite our latest arrival yet (12:30 a.m. or so) the previous night, we got a relatively early start in the morning. Here's a shot of Jody and Joe (that dot on the road way ahead of him) at 9:30 a.m. You can see that Jody's back to wearing both leg and arm warmers, but at least the sun is shining and it's not raining. That morning, I remember thinking how happy I was to have survived the typhoon and how pleasing it was to ride in "normal" conditions again. I guess you could say I was back to "Oh, yeah, I'm definitely going to make it to Tijuana." mode.
I'm telling you, what a difference a day makes. Here's a picture of me in front of the Rabobank in Cayucos. We'd already ridden about 25 miles and we'd only been on the bikes for 1'20". Not bad, eh? (Too bad the bank was closed. I really wonder what the reaction of the employees would have been when they laid eyes on me. Heck, I wonder if any of them are even from Holland. I guess I'll just have to do the ride over again someday and time it so that I arrive on a work day...)
Two and a half hours later, the weather was as good as it gets. Here I am, riding behind Joe, heading into Pismo Beach.
We stopped for lunch at this place that Jody picked out, Hoagies. Awesome choice, dude! You can't even imagine how relaxed I was feeling while I was waiting for my food. The previous night, I was riding through Hell, but here I was, sitting in warm sunshine, just a few hundred feet from the beach, surrounded by palm trees, watching people walking around in shorts (and jeans...) and wearing shades (or not...) and carrying surfboards (trust me!)... It was awesome! I guess this thought sums up how I felt: "Holy cow, I'm back in southern California!"
And then my food came! Granted, it wasn't the healthiest
I don't remember exactly how we ended up on this road with that monster hill ahead. (I realize it doesn't look like a monster hill in this picture, but it was. Believe me. She was short, but quite steep.) I think Jody decided to go with the alternate route here. Or else the alternate route was the one we didn't take, and this was simply the lesser of two evils.
This is another of my photos that won't win any prizes, but if I hadn't taken it, I probably would have forgotten the saddest moment of the whole ride. The police car pictured here is the second one that zoomed by us. We were all obviously wondering what could be going on. A little later, we found out. There had been an accident. A bicyclist was down, being treated by paramedics. I didn't want to know what happened, so I just kept on riding. Was it a hit-and-run? Did the guy crash? Did he have a heart attack? Was he injured? Was he dead? Who knows? Whatever it was that happened, I took a moment to reflect on the danger of what we were doing. But I limited that moment to just that: a moment. Otherwise, I might have had trouble continuing on my way. The show must go on!
An hour later, at 4:00 p.m., we found ourselves on some completely open, practically deserted roads. You can see that, for one of the few times during the ride, we weren't worried at all about cars coming along. So much so that ...
... Jody later decided to do some riding Japanese-style, i.e., on the "wrong" side of the road. (I took this picture nearly an hour after the previous one!)
Numbers, numbers. This was the type of sign I enjoyed seeing. And here's how my brain reacted when I saw it: "Only 14 miles to go to the goal, which translates to about 24 kilometers, which translates to about an hour, which translates to a 7:00 p.m. arrival..." And of course, I also thought about the distance to LA, which would end up being "only" 140 miles after we reached Buellton (San Marcos Motel, $75.90), which would be one long, long day of riding.
A delicious dinner was usually our reward for a hard day of riding. As you've read by now, we didn't always find good food, but this night we certainly did! We went to Pea Soup Andersen's and absolutely pea-ged out. Here's a look at Joe using a spoon to hold up his famously thick milkshake (we each had one), which was more like a full glass of ice cream. You gotta love it, starting a meal off with dessert...
And here's a look at Jody's super-sized salad, ...
my salmon with succulent sides, ...
as well as this stupendous sundae (a.k.a. dessert number two), split three ways. The waitress had warned us that this dessert was a biggie, but we were still surprised at its size when it arrived. By the time we ordered it, we were absolutely stuffed, but, because ordering dessert had become one of our dinnertime rituals, we went for it, anyway. I guess we should have gone with the cheesecake, which would have been a lot safer. Believe me, the three of us struggled mightily to manhandle this monstrosity, which we estimated at 10,000 calories. Surely that was a slight exaggeration, but the huge amount of calories we were consuming was one of our daily topics of conversation, so we were simply having a bit of fun with that over dinner. By the way, can you tell by our expressions that we were a bit tired? Even if you can't, we were. And can you see how my face is sunburned? It wasn't that bad, but still, I should have done a better job of taking care of my skin. Oh, and do you see that ridiculous orange and black thing around my neck? Well, that was the day before Halloween, so I was doing my bit to celebrate, albeit one day early. As a matter of fact, when I walked into the place, I pointed to my lovely Halloween decoration and proudly declared to the hostess, "I've got the spirit!" For whatever reason, I was usually in a ridiculously good mood over dinner. I guess that's what riding 100-miles-plus a day does to me!
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