Just in the nick of time for the first good rain of fall, my steed is nearly complete and my vestments ready. The road to San Diego lies wide open, evoking smoky visions of rooftops at midnight, forgotten alleyways, silver Shoreline, space battles, un-flat tires that turn the peddles for you, too-late romance, coastal dinosaurs, and that perverted Paul Bunyan statue leering from the redwoods to the north. I have no definite time schedule and an appropriately liquid concept of the intended route. Furthermore, I have already surmounted unspeakable personal barriers by at least half-braking a solemn promise I once made to myself on the top of an erupting volcano in Micronesia on Eck New Year to never wear spandex or clip-ons.

I'm buying biking shorts.

(case of rotten tomatoes launched individually from tiny homemade catapults)

written by  chaddeal on October 13 from Eureka, United States
from the travel blog: The CaliforniaX 9000 Autumnal Bicycle Bonanza
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The bus spit me out in the small lumber town of Rio Dell. It was nearly 3pm, but the weather was fair and my demeanor expansive. I called my mom and ate a few tacos. Then off, down that road, the mighty 101, still getting used to the weight of the bags, maybe 50 pounds making the bike a more sluggish, deliberate vehicle which resisted going uphill and then refused to stop going down. The route, which I have taken by car countless times, took on a whole new character at cycle's pace. In no time I was on the Avenue of the Giants winding around ancient redwood groves and minivans full of Arizonans on the last legs of tourist season.

Just before dark I floundered into Burlington camp ground and chatted with the host. I paid the man $5 and set up camp in the Hike and Bike section. Camping next to me were a couple from Switzerland, of course, half through a trip bicycling around the world. No matter where you go, if you see someone on a bike loaded up with gear zooming through the middle of nowhere, the odds would favor you to assume that they are Swiss, and their destination is the tip of some distant continent several months away. The Swiss simply have shit figured out.

At the next site over I met Malcom and James, both of whom had started their ride about a month earlier in northern Washington. I had seen James a few days before standing on a corner with his bike in uptown Arcata. He is biking all the way to Argentina. He'd better like the Swiss.

I took a walk in the woods. When I returned it was dark and I went to my tent to sleep. But then, a great noise aroused me from slumber - a voice, loud, assertive, incessant, engaging the couple camped next to me.

"I'm John! I'm the strange one! I'm going north! That's right, north! Straight back to Canada! Slowly but surely! What kinda bike is that anyways, hey? An old GT knockoff, hey? Well, I will be damned, I will be god damned! Ya know, I got a friend over there at the GT factory in New Mexico! Oh yeah, they all know me there! Crazy old Canadian John! Just another wacky Canuck, thats me!"

Canuck John went on for about half an hour, requiring only the vaguest grunts of feedback from his audience to continue.

"Ya know there was this one time I was at a campsite a lot like this one! I lit up a doobie, a huge old thing, must have been about a foot long, and just about as wide! And this woman comes over, real hag, she says 'I don't like that!' but I just look at her and smile and say, 'hey lady, look around you. You're in the woods!'"

Eventually, when John's Grand Combustion had finally expired, the campground was silent. The next morning he spotted me on the way to the bathroom.

"San Diego, hey? Let me tell you about this one time in San Diego..."

And off he went on some story about booze, buds, babes, and bikes. I liked the guy. It was 8:30 in the morning and he was already puffing a joint and working on a silo of Busch Light. He struck me as a sort of archetype, something out of a JRR Tolkien novel or an old Druidic folk tale, the hapless fool who comes plowing through the woods at just the right time, spilling beer and stories and a laugh that makes your spleen contract.

We talked for a while. Well, I listened for a while. A truck full of convicts in orange jumpsuits arrived and began hacking down tree limbs and sweeping things up. The campground was closing for the season. Everybody packed up and took off.

The last thing I heard was Canuck John hucking it up with the camp host saying, "Slowly but surely, thats me!"

written by  chaddeal on October 20 from Rio Dell, United States
from the travel blog: The CaliforniaX 9000 Autumnal Bicycle Bonanza
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I stopped down the way at a park in Benbow and stretched for a while feeling unhurried and open to anything. Eventually I found myself at the Standish-Hickey state park, where James was almost finished with a six pack. The atmosphere was less festive than Burlington. We were the only bikers there. The sun set and we sat around over a few beers. James explained the problem of Canuck John thusly:

"The guy looks like a potato and he's full of shit."

Which was probably mostly true. So we laughed like baboons doing Canuck John impressions late into the night.

"So I woke up the other morning on top of this fine brunette thing and..."

"Did I tell you about the time when I...."

What more can be said? The guy is a classic specter of the Hike and Bike subrealms, and one may take Comfort in the fact that even now Canuck John is out there somewhere emitting strange odors and high-velocity plot lines to anything in ear shot before hopping back on his bike and cracking a warm can of cheap brew saying, "Slowly but surely, thats me!"

written by  chaddeal on October 21 from Redway, United States
from the travel blog: The CaliforniaX 9000 Autumnal Bicycle Bonanza
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But no. It was a large hill, yes. Steep at times, seemingly endless. But so what? The great metaphor of bicycle touring vs life itself was already dawning upon me. Once you come to terms with the fact the there will be hellish hills and there will be blissful rides down, everything else is just spinning peddles. I could go forever. I saw the chorizo burrito I had for breakfast burning in my stomach like a candle. Keep breathing, some water, yell something for effect, and keep on spinning peddles. There is no arrival. Only this moment, both suffering and ecstatic. Keep on spinning peddles.

Eventually a sliver of ocean became visible through the trees and then there is was, the ocean, churning foam and the sand making sizzling sounds as water retreated back to the sea. Everything felt surreal, the epitome of itself, a simulation.

MacKerricher state park lies a few miles north of Fort Bragg on the coastal highway 1. I ate a can of beans for dinner and we had a few beers talking to Brad, who had been camped in the Hike and Bike for a few days. He was old, missing most his teeth, surly, and bizarre, but with an unlikely humanitarian edge. Brad looked like an absolute bum. His shirt said "Best Wrestler in Arizona" but claimed to live in Catalina for three seasons of the year. In the winter he takes the ferry into LA and starts walking north. Sometime he ends up in Canada, other times settles down right here in Mendocino County. He knew every camp spot, legal or not, on the Pacific.

Brad has had five wives in his lifetime, all of them crazy, some of them with papers, paid one penny in alimony one time because thats how much he told the judge she was worth to him, hates his daughter, doesn't speak to his son, yet is the founder of a homeless program in Fort Bragg which feeds and shelters transients in churches over the cold winter months. The program has a strict no drinking or drugs policy which Brad summarized thusly:

"Hell, I'd turn my own wife away if she'd been drinking. And you can bet she has!"

A craggy grin and a hoarse laugh.

written by  chaddeal on October 22 from Fort Bragg, United States
from the travel blog: The CaliforniaX 9000 Autumnal Bicycle Bonanza
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