Border Crossing, Redwoods, and More Rain

The border was lined by shimmery green fields of what would soon be Easter lilies, completely unobvious except for the medium-sized 'Welcome to California!' sign. There seemed to be a bit of disagreement in just which border town was the “Easter Lily Capital of the World”...Brookings, OR, or tiny Smith River, CA. We left them to compete in peace, only stopping to gobble the fresh doughnuts from Brookings we had acquired that morning. In Crescent City, CA we stopped by the visitor center only to discover what we had suspected for some time: California has no cycling map! It was about this time that we realized just how spoiled rotten we had been by Oregon's DOT-produced coastal bike map, detailing distances, elevations, typical wind directions and more! No such luck in the Golden State.


The past week has been a blur, but here's a few reflections:
Despite the few torrential downpours we endured, Oregon treated us well. After spending the night in the Newport Travelodge last Sunday night, we got to experience a gray Monday afternoon touring the way many people choose to do: Supported! We wanted to keep biking, and our parents wanted to keep hanging out with us, so somebody suggested that we ride as far as we could while our parents carried our heavy panniers. It suddenly made so much sense, why people tour that way. You can go so far! You don't feel like you're actually might die on every incline! And, at the end, after we had biked 48 miles in just a few hours, we had a support team to cheer us on and tell us how impressive we were over and over again. Yes, they were our parents so they were pretty much required to do that. But it was so dang nice I think I might consider paying somebody to play that role sometime....sometime in the faraway future of course. I still treasure my touring independence :).

We spent one night in a campground just south of Florence. The next day we got a nice late start (our specialty), set off for a lovely day of hills and freshly layed asphalt, surprise sunshine and views of the expansive ocean. Then it got dark. We were dead-set on making it all the way to Bandon, as we had arranged our 2^nd Warmshowers host of the trip. We were once again soaking wet, as some heavy showers rolled in around dusk. We ended up biking about 8 miles in the pitch black, which was terrifying and felt pretty stupid on our part. Cycling through the pitch black with only 6 tiny blinking lights to guide your way can make a person rather dizzy. I had to take a little time-out when we finally got off the highway, had a little cry, and regained true cycling composure for the last mile to the house. We were justified only by the fact that we were presented with our very own surfer chalet at the end of the day's 72 mile journey.

Brian was the name of our host, a self-proclaimed anti-bicyclist who only took people in for the “cultural experience” it gave his children, who were growing up in beautiful yet homogeneous Bandon, OR. His profile was part scary and part hilarious, detailing exactly the kinds of people he wasn't interested in: Americans, engineering students, people who weren't interested in babysitting or cooking delicious food. He preferred foreigners, especially couples. He didn't care much about “our story,” so we didn't talk it up. Instead, we made a fort with his two young children, whom he left us with promptly after meeting us. He turned out to be a really nice guy, and even though he was serious about hating bicycles, it was somehow in the most endearing way possible. The house we slept in was not his house, but rather a friend's foreclosed mansion that another friend was sort of squatting in. There was basically nothing in the house except a few surfboards and hundreds of old surfer magazines. The electricity worked, there was hot water and a bathtub, so the three of us fell into a hard sleep as the rain fell even harder on the roof above us.

We spent two more nights in Oregon, one in the Humbug State Park and one in a campground outside of Brookings. The next day we entered California, spent a night in Klamath and a day biking through the unfathomable beauty that is the Redwood forest. And now here I sit in Arcata, surrounded by espresso and beautiful earthy college students and housed by Ben's family friends Amy and Rees. Their hospitality has been amazing, especially considering we called them about half an hour before we showed up in Arcata, Ben not having seen them since he went backpacking with them 10 years ago! We were all very enthralled by beautiful Arcata, as well as a lazy day off. Today, back to biking, the 101, and whatever surprises Northern California has in store for these 3 travelers today.