“We aren’t the only cowboys in this rodeo …”

Jim and I finished our Pacific Coast border to border ride and Bill would have been right there with us if he had not had his close encounter of the worst kind with the pavement just north of San Francisco.  However, Jim, Bill and I were not the only parties on this ride.  Others that I am overdue in mentioning are our SAG team, my wife Dennie and her mom Ellie; plus the other riders that we met along the way.

I will start with our precious SAG team.  This ride would not have been possible without my lovely wife’s support accompanied by her mother.  Some of my riding friends who have done SAG duty on some of our longer local rides wanted to know, “Did Dennie stay close to you guys all the time while you were riding, ready to provide assistance? Was your food and extra water in the SAG wagon and did Dennie drive her route close to us to make sure she was immediately available in the event in case we were hungry, or wet, or cold, or hot, or tired”.  And to those questions, I have a succinct answer, “No”.  Before we left Albuquerque and while we were having our pre-trip meetings, Dennie let us know how she was going to SAG. Dennie said, “You guys ride longer distances all the time at home, than what you are going to be riding each day on this trip and you don’t have SAG wagons.  So I don’t think I have to follow along and stop every 15 miles and wait for you.  If the weather is sketchy, I will be close; or if we set something else up the night before during our dinner discussion, I will be where I need to be.  Otherwise, you guys all have cell phones.  We will decide what time we are all rolling into our motel in the afternoon, and I will see you then.  If you need me during the ride, call me”. 

That’s how Dennie rolls.  And actually, it worked out just fine.  We often saw her driving by us while we were riding, and she would honk, but only a few times did we need to have her attend us before we rolled into the motel for the evening.  One time Jim and I wanted to be picked up because it started raining, our health was a bit marginal, we had been riding in the rain for a few days and we did not feel like doing more rain riding.  Another time, we had a 95 mile ride down the Big Sur Coast and we set up where Dennie would meet us with food and water.  And of course, when Bill went down, we had to stop the ride for a few days and haul in to Santa Rosa.  So Dennie’s style of SAG support worked out well for everyone.  It did not tie her down, she could get out of the motel a little later than we did, she and her mom could do their sightseeing and we could do our riding. 

One other thing that Dennie took upon herself was finding brewpubs.  One of our sons, Andrew, is a brewmeister, and Dennie considered a lot of this trip to be field trip researching for Andrew.  It was not unusual to hit more than one microbrewery (or at least a brewpub) in a day.  Dennie was buying pint glasses for son Andrew, and Jim and I would buy a bike jersey if the microbrewery had a nice one.  Jim and I also had a goal to get Bill to try a beer, but Bill remained true to his principals and brew never touched his lips.  He was waiting for the wine country, but alas, that was not to be.  Many have asked, what was your favorite beer and Jim and I both rue the fact that we did not take better brew notes.  We both liked the Tricerahops Double IPA brewed by Ninkasi Brewing Company in Oregon, and the Acme IPA by North Coast Brewery in Fort Bragg was excellent, but our favorite beer was what we drank in Leggett, California and neither of us remember what it was, but that story will be told in my next blog post.

Dennie’s SAG partner for this ride was her mom and this trip was a real blessing for her mom.  Dennie’s mom had just undergone a full mastectomy on the right side for breast cancer and she had just finished her second round of chemotherapy for lung cancer days before we left for this trip.  In fact in the first few days of the trip, I was wondering if she was going to have to go back home because the days following her second chemotherapy sessions were very, very rough.  But as the chemicals flushed from her system, she regained her energy and was able to finish her SAG duties and have fun with Dennie.  She is a rabid Dallas Cowboys fan (yuck) and Jim is a rabid Green Bay Packers fan and they both go way back, so it was fun to hear them pick at each other over the dinner table after our rides.  And her drink of choice is Beranger’s White Zinfandel (another yuck; I actually bought her a T-shirt one time that said, “Friends don’t let friends drink white zinfandel”), and Bill, our wine drinker, always catered to her taste and would try to find her white zin.  Fortunately, they were unsuccessful most of the time.  All in all, this trip was a real blessing for her, even putting up with her son-in-law was not all that bad.  Dennie was able to spend some quality time with her mother, and Ellie saw parts of the Pacific coast states that she had never seen.  And rest assured, Dennie is one to make sure you see everything possible that there is to see.

We also were not the only riders on the Pacific Coast route.  This was my first attempt at a long distance ride more than a thousand miles long, more than a month long.  It turned out to be 1713 miles of pedaling and five weeks on the road.  We were doing it the deluxe way though.  We were doing what is referred to as a supported credit card ride.  We had Dennie and her mom doing SAG and we stayed in a motel, or with friends every night.  If you were to see us riding, you would probably think we were a local because we did not have panniers and bags hanging off the front and back of our bikes.  Other riders were not doing it the deluxe way we were doing it.  They were the riders with the panniers hanging off the front and back of their bikes, or the ones with wagon’s trailing behind their bikes.  These were the touring riders.  It seems all of the touring riders we talked to were not doing the entire border to border coast trail.  Some were going Vancouver to San Francisco, or Seattle to San Diego, or some subset of the Pacific Coast trail.  Except for Jamie from the UK, most of these touring riders we quickly passed and did not get to spend time talking to them. 

The first touring riders we met was a couple from Los Angeles.  He was on extended leave and they were biking from Seattle to Los Angeles.  I talked to them in Elma, Washington, the first time.  We were checking into a Microtel in Elma and it was raining and they wanted to know the room rates.  It seems the room rates were too high for their budget and so they were looking for a place to camp in the rain.  They also told me about a Korean couple that they met outside of Seattle.  This couple retired in Korea and decided they wanted to bicycle the Pacific coast of the USA.  They flew to Seattle, bought bikes and gear and set out.  The first day they rode 12 miles.  I often wonder how far they actually made it. Next day we stayed two days in Chehalis, Washington, and did minor maintenance and our wash and then set out for Oregon.  Heading to Astoria, we passed this couple from Los Angeles again, so they must have spent a successful night somewhere in the rain. 

The next other rider of interest was Veronique from Quebec, Canada.  Veronique was tour biking by herself and I was astounded by the amount of gear she had on her bike.  How did she get that much gear up a hill?  We took a break together and talked some.  Her first language was French but her accented English was pleasant to listen to.  Her plan was to ride as far as San Francisco and she had started in Vancouver, British Columbia.  We bid our adieus and parted.  I hope she made her goal.   

In Oregon we saw a couple more touring riders.  One was Craig and he wanted to ride down to Panama but he did not know Spanish.  I think a knowledge of Spanish would be the least of your troubles cycling through Mexico these days, I would not attempt it.  He had a plan though.  He met a girl the prior day that did know Spanish and she was riding to Guatemala and he was going to try to catch her and ride through Mexico with her.  Not much of a plan in my opinion. 

We also saw a guy riding a recumbent bike pulling a trailer.  He started in Portland and he was heading for central California or however far he made it, in his words.  We saw a few more touring riders that we were not able to speak to on the central Oregon coast. On our last full day in Oregon in Gold Beach, we were hit and hammered by a rain storm while we were riding, horizontal rain in our face.  At times, we were standing in our pedals just to maintain forward speed on level ground.  It was a nasty storm. Fortunately, the next day was a rest day, so while it rained, we did our wash and let nature spend herself out. The next day was sunny and we rode on into California.  However, we saw very, very few other touring riders until we got down below San Francisco.  The storm seemed to filter out many riders who might have not known the magnitude of what they were undertaking, and perhaps were not as prepared as they needed to be to successfully complete multi-day, long distance ride.  Clearly some were out there because we met Jamie and Jackie later, but there were not as many. 

South of San Francisco, we started running into more touring riders.  Jamie of the UK was one, and he was riding from Seattle to the Mexican border.  We also passed Francoise of France, on his recumbent, just south of Half Moon Bay, California.

We saw another couple of men, father and son perhaps, that were riding San Francisco to San Luis Obispo, and we saw them climbing the hills on the Big Sur coast.  In Santa Barbara, we passed a couple from Switzerland that had decided to cycle the Pacific Coast.  I am not sure where they started from. 

And when we got a couple of days out of San Diego, we passed a group of men cycling from Santa Barbara, California to San Diego.  Later we met them on the San Diego ferry to Coronado and spent more time talking to them.  They were a group from Gilbert, Arizona and they called themselves ‘The Weezers’.  They could have been your classic old guys on nice bikes that you see riding into coffee shops everywhere, but to their credit, they were touring and doing a multi-day trip from Santa Barbara to San Diego.  They were also fully supported by their wives (the Weezerette’s?) and had no panniers.

Other people that we “met” on the road, saving the best for last, were my friends and family that hosted us in their homes.  Joe and I worked for many years together at Intel and he made his beach house available to us in Oregon. I really, really enjoyed spending time catching up with Joe.  And then Theresa and Rod opened up their home to us, also on the Oregon coast.  From their living room window, you could see surfers in close to shore and whales spouting offshore through the trees.  Staying in their home was special.  And then in southern California, my favorite cousin, Margaret, opened up her house and we spend a couple of days visiting before we pedaled south to our border goal.  Friends and family are special and I am blessed to be able count friends and family close.

These were some of the people we met on the road, the other cowboys in this rodeo.  Jim and I spent some time commenting on our trip later and independently we both had the same thought.  We kind of envied the tour riders with their panniers. And now we are both considering doing the Atlantic coast.  But we are considering doing the ride with touring bikes, with panniers and doing the camping routine. I guess I should let Dennie know before we leave.

On my next post, I hope to tell you our highlights, what we would do different, and any other key learning or events.