Today is another rest day, which means we get to eat something other than oatmeal for breakfast, we get to do laundry and do a little bike maintenance, if needed. Yesterday we rode to Leggett, California. Leggett is very, very small and it was at the end of a 71 mile ride with 4200 feet of climbing and we were very, very thirsty. We went to a market, only to find it was shut down. A little further down the road, we could see a pizza place with a few guys sitting on the porch, so we rolled on down and investigated. It turns out the pizza place was closed also and the reason why the guys were sitting out front is one of them had convinced his girlfriend to unlock the place so they could watch the football games on one of the few TV’s with reception in Leggett. We queried where we could by a beer and they said there was another market about a mile up the road where we could buy beer. We asked if they thought the market would mind if we sat out in front of their store and drank our beers. They replied, “Shouldn’t be a problem, everyone is pretty laid back in Leggett.” Then the boyfriend of the girlfriend asked, “Are you hungry? If you just want a beer, I bet I could get my girlfriend to pour beers, but it will be two more hours before this place opens and you could buy a pizza because the dough is not ready yet.” Five minutes later we had joined the guys on the porch drinking a brown ale, an IPA and Bill was drinking his Coke. We have yet to get Bill to have beer. He is our committed wino on this trip.
At our last rest day, four days earlier, I had attempted to arrange lodging in Leggett because that was the end of this ride and it would also be a rest day. Lodging was scarce in Leggett but I finally found a place, Stone Gate Lodge, and I gave them a call. Mike answered the phone. “No, he did not have rooms with two queens; no, there was not internet.” “Yes, there was cell phone reception, a bar and a half, but if we climbed a nearby 300 foot hill, then we could get five bars.” “No, there was no breakfast provided and no restaurant in Leggett, there was only a pizza place but down the road , six miles, there was a place called the Pig House.” “No, we don’t have laundry facilities and there is not a laundromat in Leggett.” “Yes, I could figure out how to get five of you in beds for two nights but (and this was the kicker that convinced us to consider lodging in another place), why would you want to stay two nights here or in Leggett?”
So, I went out on the internet and the closest place I could find reasonable lodging that had restaurants and a laundromat was Garberville, California. Garberville was on our route but about 20 miles before Leggett. So, we decided to ride to Leggett, as we did, and have Dennie meet us, put the bikes on top of the van and drive back to Garberville. And that is what we did and that is how we ended up spending a day in Garberville. Garberville has turned out to be a very interesting town. It has the potential to be charming, but charming is not how I would describe it. Yesterday was our fourteenth day of riding and we have probably stayed in fifteen different places and we have cycled through probably hundreds of communities. In a prior blog I described North Bend as the armpit of the Oregon Coast. I am not sure what appendage I would use to select to describe Garberville, maybe it is the booger in the left nostril. If you want to know more about Garberville, you can check out this link Impressions Of a Homeless Meeting. Humboldt county, probably due to some of the local harvest you will not find in any grocery store, has a very high concentration of the young and not so young homeless. And Garberville is apparently the focal point for most of these homeless pot users (and apparently meth users) in northern California. The odor of hemp occasionally wafts through the woods, or from an open window in the motel we are staying at; and yes, I know what it smells like because I am a Vietnam veteran, but I did not inhale. Today we did laundry and I often find the most interesting people in a laundromat. Our visit to the laundromat today definitely exceeded its quota of very interesting people. Dreadlocks, tattoos, skinheads, plus Rebecca, the owner of the laundromat. My biking gloves get so dirty when I ride, I like to hand wash them so I don’t contaminate the rest of the load. I asked Rebecca, “Do you have a sink where I could hand wash them?” “No, they broke it.” “Who broke it? The residents?” “No.” “Uh, the transients?” I told her I had been in a lot of towns in my ride from the Canadian border but this one definitely has a much different ambience, so to speak, then any of the others. She then proceeded to tell me a bit of history about the town. Her grandfather had moved there in 1919 to make fence posts out of redwoods and her family had been there ever since. But apparently the location of Garberville (Doobieville?) is both remote yet close enough to the Bay area to attract a younger homeless crowd looking for adventure. She says one of the big issues though, is that local law enforcement is afraid to do any enforcement or move the homeless on and out of town. Apparently there are enough lawyers in San Francisco ready to sue for the civil rights of the homeless and disadvantaged in Garberville that the local law does very little. So, the locals find it difficult to tell the transients to clear the sidewalk, or keep the noise down or pee somewhere else. The link Impressions Of A Homeless Meeting is a description of a town meeting in Garberville that included locals and some of the homeless.
So tomorrow we have a very big climb out of Leggett to start the day and then it is mostly downhill and down to the coast again; destination is Fort Bragg. We will be on California Coast Highway 1 and we are not sure what the road is going to look like. Literature about this part of the route says only very experienced riders should ride this section. Friends we have stayed with on this trip and others we have met say there is very little shoulder and to make matters worse, they say the drivers are crazy. So, this could possibly be the sketchiest part of our ride so far. I will let you know more in my next post.
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