Day 10 - Eureka, CA - Garberville, CA

 Day 10  Eureka, CA - Garberville, CA
Bike - Specialized Roubaix
Day's run - 68.2 miles
Total elapsed miles - 596.7

July 12, 1961 - Burlington to Standish-Hickey

     Got started at ten-15 and hot by then. Bought quart of milk and Grape Nuts and rolls for breakfast.  Broke another spoke and replaced it.  Rode 'til one o'clock when it got too hot so stopped and spent three hours in and around the Eel River.  Rode from three to six-thirty and am now camped in Standish-Hickey S.P.  Mosquitoes pretty bad.  Cooked chicken-rice soup for supper.  Redwoods very pretty.  Time for campfiire gathering.  I am at the junction of Hwys 1 and 101.  I get back to the cool coast tomorrow.  Over 100 here today.   Tentatively plan to get home Wednesday night.  Made only 47 miles.

     As in 1961, today was everything that yesterday wasn't: dry and fast.  Launched at 12:05 after a visit to The Blue Ox, a still-functioning antique woodworking facility that, among other things, produces custom gingerbread, filigree work and wood gutters for Victorian restorations, including of the California State Capitol in Sacramento.

     The breeze was fair and the roads (mostly US 101) gently rising to ascend  the downward course of the valleys of the Eel River and its eastern branch.  Made more miles in the first hour (14, including a couple of miles of stop-and-go in the city (of 26,128, not what I said in my last post) did in the first two-plus hours yesterday, and ended up in Garbersville, at the end of the day's run of 68.2 miles, at 5:30.

     En route, at about 2:40, I overtook another solitary rider on a freeway bridge, and we ended up hanging and riding together until our arrival at Garbersville.  Having checked into our motel, the Sherwood Forest (a better establishment than last night's, with a certain rustic charm) on my recommendation, he joined Bob and me for dinner of pasta in an establishment a minute's walk away (in G'ville, nothing is more than two minutes' walk away - in fact, the main street ends in a turn-around that shunts you back toward the freeway entrance).  My riding companion, Sean Kelly, an early-forties,  free-lance, high-end bike repairman from Denver, Colorado, is on his first multi-day ride.  He shipped his Salsa adventure bike from Denver, along with trailer, to Astoria, flew to Portland, and bussed down to Astoria.  After the first day or so, he lost the trailer, commissioning a bike shop to ship in home for him.  We turned out to be a pretty good match, with his extra 35-40 pounds of bike and gear traded off against my 25 years, and plan to meet tomorrow for breakfast and to continue our ride over the 1800-foot crest of the Coast Range.

     Sean is plugged in, ordering the delivery of a dinner to his girlfriend back in Denver on his PDA while partaking of pasta and salad with Bob and me.  After he apparently fixed the shifting and skipping problem on my Giant Innova with a few twists of an adjustment screw and some liberal shots of WD-40 into the shifters and cables, I invited him for a nightcap at the Branding Iron Saloon, two minutes away from our lodging.

     Will make reservations in Fort Ross, back on the coast, in the morning.

    Three things come to mind as different from 50 years ago:
     --The roads are a lot better, with far more vehicle-bicycle separation.
     --There's a lot more awareness of the threat of tsunamis.  Every lowlying coastal town displays signs warning of the hazard and advising when you have gained enough elevation to avoid it.  There was a massive tsunami on the central Oregon coast in 1700, triggered by a Richter nine earthquake in the Cascadia subduction zone, and it could happen again any day.  Crescent City, our overnight place the night before last, suffered damage and deaths both following the Good Friday Alaskan earthquake of 1964 and the March 2011 Japanese quake and tsunami.
     --The population is much more diverse.  In 1961, if it wasn't brown and white or salmon, it wasn't food.  Now, there's a Mexican restaurant in every town and village, including Garbersville.  Last night in Eureka, our Mexican restaurant server was Cambodian (she said there are four Cambodian families in Eureka) and we drove by a Pho house this morning while looking for a bike shop and a Bank of America.

     Until tomorrow.

     Bob