Day 60: Short End of the Rainstick (Wildcat Den to Rock Island)

We just can't catch a break on this weather. Since Idaho, we've been dragging thunderstorms across the U.S., heck, we even got rained on in the desert in Oregon.

The day started out sunny enough, but heavy with the humidity. Just a couple miles out of the state park, I saw the Mississippi for the first time! Magnificent. So much history flowed down that river. (Samuel Clemens' chosen name, Mark Twain, hails from his steamboat days - means the water was 12 feet deep, good enough for the boat). 

After I gaped for a while, sweating out a liter of water as my body struggled to acclimate to the might-as-well-have-been-Louisiana weather, I headed for Davenport to run some errands. We were trying to make 70 some miles to Hennepin Canal State Park, off the Grand Illinois trail. Theoretically, the trail (made of the Hennepin canal trail and the I&M canal trail) would run us almost all the way to La Porte.

Hwy 22 out of wildcat was more of the same: beat up road with no shoulder. I did stop to take a quick dip in the aforementioned river at an RV camp spot down the road. But for the most part it was industrial with heavy truck traffic. Eventually I turned down Utah Ave to get on a frontage road that took me into town on emptier roads and bike paths. Clearly, the Mississippi had overflowed the night before, the roadways were soaked, the ditches pools for fishes.

The Quad Cities straddle the river, two on the Illinois side and two on Iowa's, bridges criss-crossing every few miles. The bike-friendly bridge is this car/railroad bridge made out of blackened steel, and it rattles and squeals as you ride across it, the rushing waters of the Mississippi visible through the crosshatching below your tires. Sadly, Illinois didn't welcome us with any kind of sign, so Rachel made one up. 

Rachel's been plagued with flats, so I went to Bike n Hike for an extra tube and was subsequently adopted. The guys working the shop kept brining their customers in back and challenging them to lift my bike with all my gear. I maxed out their scales when they tried to weigh it. They kept remarking about what a "mighty small lass" I was.. And while I know they meant it as nothing but admiration, and they were nothing but good to us, it's still a little shocking that it's such a surprise to people that we are capable of this trip. Or surprise isn't really the right word, unexpected maybe, as in, this is something they rarely ever encounter. And obviously there aren't an enormous number of people cycling across the county, and Rachel and I still haven't run into any other women doing it but, what am I trying to say. Maybe that I am a little bummed it's so unexpected.

Anyways, the owner of the shop offered to let me use his truck to pick up groceries etc while they looked my bike over and wheooo pickups are fun to drive. Closest you get to feeling like Godzilla. I went to the Hyvee and it took me an hour to go shopping because the store is like half a mile long. It takes fifteen minutes just to walk down an aisle.

By the time I returned, Rachel had arrived and it began to rain. And then we opened the back door 10 minutes later and there were sheets of water pounding down at a good 45 degree angle. We weren't going anywhere.

Steve, the shop owners, offered us dinner and a bed at his place and we gladly took him up on the offer. We hung around the shop for the rest of the day then headed back with him.

His grandson Noah greeted us, a 6.5 year old ball of adorable precociousness. Kid has the most remarkable memory for detail. Watch out for him. 

After a delicious chicken and veggie dinner, some laundry and some conversation, we headed to bed a little too late and ready for some decent weather tomorrow. 

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Day 1: The Sea to the Sky (San Francisco to Point Reyes)

A thousand feet above sea level, maybe, and our thighs are burning, so we pull off the asphalt because we can’t heave our 90-pound* bikes any further up the mountain without fast and heavy calories.

Day one and we’re climbing Mount Tam and it’s just straight on the up and up for four, five ten twenty miles (who knows how long it actually was). Rachel and I vow never to follow beauty over mountains again.*

At the top, a pint-sized public bus pulls up to the ridge and out climb a dad wearing a Bruins cap and a girl who went to Wesleyan. There’s a bus that drops you off at the top? They wish us luck; we give them stickers.

*no accurate weight available
*we’re going to do it again with the Sierras; 11,000 feet of climbing in 3-4 days

Finally, we throw ourselves down the backside of the mountain toward the Pacific (our second meeting that day; our first ended with shoes, socks, cleats, gear sets, drenched in salt water, a Californian baptism before we turn east), the whole word rattling under our wheels, vibrating, buzzing with dissipated potential energy. 

At the bottom, Amanda welcomes us with  sour cream and onion sun chips and Paul scoops some dairy-free pesto onto a hunka bread while drinking a beer out of an egg carton. We’re just tasting the beginning of being hungry all the time.

After Stinson beach, the road runs along the water for a couple of miles and the seals are laid out like tootsie rolls on the sand bars. The rolling hills feel like wicked mountains.

Then Olema, great, tiny little town, we’re close to camp, and we’re just about out of steam. Paul and Rachel pick up a map and

then the gut-punch that Sky Camp looms 1,000+ feet above us, nestled in the fog. The sun hangs low over the hilltops and the air started to nip. At least, Rachel’s friends had pulled up around the corner ran and they offered to stack our bags in their car and carry them up the mountain.

So for the first mile it feels like our bikes are the finest carbon fiber, weig nothing, and we power up the hill. But I’m down to my lowest gear by the end of it, muscles wasted, inching upwards at 3.5 miles per darkening hour.

At the parking lot, we realize we don’t have permits and two other cars have tickets, so Rachel’s friends leave a note on the dash and we tack a warning to the post to try to catch Thomas and Max. The days’ not over yet – there’s a 1.2 mile hike to camp, and it’s too dark by then to ride on the gravelly. The only option is to lean on the handlebars and shove them up the hill, tires and shoe soles slipping on the rocks. The path is definitely angled somewhere between 60 and 125 degrees, just walkin’ upside down.

Halfway there, Josh, Thomas and Wires caught up with us walking. They make the final stretch bearable, and when we reach camp, it’s dark, foggy and the most welcome sight we’e seen in 12 hours. We hear it was beautiful at sunset.

Hot dogs are grilled hot on charcoal, chicken sausage loaded on, zucchini crisped and buns toasted. We feasted, we made Dionysus proud.

Josh’s Google Fire Thrower, or whatever it was called, lit up the fog to the level of a dim bar bathroom, only it smelled like salt and pines instead of sweat and beer.  You could see the little water droplets dip and spin in the air, a billion elegant ballerinas.

I went to bed full, tired, a little fed up, a little cold, and a little confused that this big thing we’d talked into the ground had actually begun.

Belabor the Day pt 3

We left Napa earlyish, after some truly awkward family photos (two children, two spouses, two grandparents, one nephew, both of us). 

The ride back down to the Bay Area was the least pleasant of all days, tempered only by the fried chicken we'd been sent off with (it did not last well, but for a while, it was tasty). In downtown Napa, you could still see the destruction wreaked by the earthquake that had shocked the town - and the whole Bay - just weeks earlier. Caution tape still encircled piles of debris, and "Unsafe to Enter" signs plastered building with missing facades. For the most part, though, it all survived intact.

We took 229 down to 29, through American Canyon. We really just road on the shoulder of the highway, trying to avoid broken glass and careless trash. It was hot, bright, and urban. We got lost in Vallejo and stopped at a mall for lunch. Haven't eaten Aunt Annie's since, but that pretzel dog, grease and all, kept me going over the bridge and down through Richmond.

Actually the bridge and the climb that came after showed off some gorgeous views of the Bay Area. We stopped briefly at the Dead Fish to fill up on water and use the loo. My aunt and uncle have taken me there before... I highly recommend the savory seafood stew. It's a deep red and the biggest portion comes in a bowl bigger than my abdomen.

We essentially just made our way along side streets beside 80 for most of the trip, until we reached the bike path in Albany that cut right to Rachel's apartment in Berkeley. We got in around 6. I think we finished the day with piping hot Udupi (southern Indian food), like always. 

Labor Day pt 1

Josh let’s us crash at his place and we wake up late. We stayed out too late at a Blind Willies concert the night before in a nostalgic basement: very nice wood paneling and decorative window slats. Rachel used to play trombone for them.

We eat a mediocre breakfast down the street from his San Francisco high rise and realize we’ve probably brought too much, like we always do.

Life’s easy over the Golden Gate. I tape my camera to my helmet with sticky black electrical tape. My OG Go-Pro is a pound of lopsided media. Tourists take pictures of me. The helmet is unstable. Did you know it takes more than 17 minutes to cross the bridge? The video I try to capture is so jerky I’m nauseated watching it on the preview screen.

Our goal: make it to Lagunitas by nightfall. We don’t. But along the way, we meet Alexi, lead singer of the Blind Willies, at Arizmendi in San Rafael. He’s driving to the Russian River. It’s not really on our way. In fact it’s over a large and steep hill and we get lost in a suburb. Google has a way of making everything look flat and mono-directional. We’re really sweaty and really late. When we finally make it, the pastries crumble and melt in our mouths, worth every second of detour.

Once you’ve climbed and descended four or five or seven hills in 90 degree heat, it’s all the same and time disintegrates around you and the aching in your thighs standardizes. So I can’t really tell you about the road between San Rafael and Petaluma except that the hills were a real pretty yellow, all dried out like the rest of the state in the midst of exceptional drought.

We’re exhausted by the time we get to Petaluma, but I don’t think we’ve every been so happy to bumble over cobblestone.

The brewery, we’re told, is three miles outside of town. (Maybe less, maybe my exhaustion drags it out). We emailed them earlier to see if we could camp at the brewery but they politely declined. We’ll be staying with our first Warm Showers (like Couchsurfing, for cyclists, yep the name is a little uncomfortable, but we are really excited about the promise of showers. First, beer.)

We get beer and sliders. We should be hungrier. The bar closes like twenty minutes after we arrive so we only have time for one beer and they won’t let Rachel order a stout float. We watch a couple dance tenderly, drunkenly under the strung-up (strung-out?) white lights. The tables empty out. Getting back on our bikes isn’t as bad as you’d think.

Our Warm Showers host, Steve and Bridget, welcome us in after we’ve called them three times because I wrote the house number down wrong. They’re remodeling. They apologize. They let us sleep in the master bedroom on a camp bed. (“You can camp outside, but you’ll have to share it with the chickens.”)

The shower they let us use is, in fact, very hot. We turn the water black. Steve and Bridget invite us to watch the rest of The Zero Theorem, a candy-colored dystopian film directed by Terry Gilliam about searching for the meaning of life (or rather, trying to prove there isn’t any). Christoph Waltz plays an anxious, uncomfortable programmer. He moves like an adolescent or a robot. The math is really bad. I hope that was on purpose.

We fall asleep immediately afterwards. Our dreams are weird.

To be continued…