Day 12 - Fort Bragg, CA - Fort Ross, CA

Day 12 - Fort Bragg, CA - Fort Ross, CA

Bike: Specialized Roubaix
Miles ridden: 85.5
Total elapsed mileage: 750.9
Time in saddle: 6:28:26
Average speed for day: 13.1 mph
Max speed for day: 39 mph

   July 14, 1961 - Got a very early 8:00 start this morning after breakfast of Raisin Bran.  Spent an enjoyable hour at historic Fort Ross from 11 to 12.  Mountains not as bad as people led me to believe.  Foggy and damp and windy from NW.  Met a college student, 28, who doesn't appear a day older than myself, and rode last ten miles with him.  From U. of Colorado.  Bought crud in Marshall and split box of milk with friend and had chicken and cake and a peach.  Am in Stinson Beach S.P..  Now I must clean up and turn in.  I make the big Foggy Town tomorrow.  I am about 16 miles from the Golden Gate.  No change in schedule foreseen.  Made 95 miles.
     P.S. 11:00 P.M.
     I have been most rudely banished.  My map showed overnight camping, and having entered from the back, was not told otherwise.  But alas, at ten o'clock, my smiling ranger came and told me the place to camp was six miles away, all uphill.  I looked around for a while, then got a motel.  I have a small but clean and warm room with no bath (actually shared bath with another room) for $3.00.  It will be worth it to sleep in a bed.  I still have $32.  I should easily get home on $10.

     Mountains not as bad...?!!  Either I wrote the understatement of my youth or there has been a tremendous amount of upthrust in that part of that Coast Range in the last 50 years.  After having seen it all on the Oregon headlands and crossing from Leggett to the coast yesterday, the stretch from Fort Ross  to Jenner took the cake.  It is a monster -  narrow road with tight curves, some without guardrails on the sea side, little to no shoulder, a vertiginuous 700-800-foot drop to the rocks and water below, a leg-burning ascent followed by a brake pad-burning descent - in sum, not something that riding companion Sean (still with me) or I care to tackle first thing tomorrow morning or that Bob is willing to drive over again to deliver us to today's end point at Fort Ross, then again cross southbound toward tomorow's planned destination.  In short, faithful readers, please forgive me my planned sin of omission, but discretion, in this case, is the better part of valor: I ain't doing it again in 2011.

     Got off a little after 8:30 in fine, cool, sunny, dry weather with the northwest wind building and put the hammer down.  Country generally gently rolling, but the coastal plateau is broken often by streams that required us to drop down to the left to cross them then grind our way back up to the right to our original level on the far side and continue on our way.  Once we were on the plateau again, the wind was our friend, its 20-miles per hour-plus at our backs providing for long stretches of 20 miles per hour-plus bike speed.   We stopped for liquids and, for Sean, a sandwich at the one store in the one-time lumbering boom town of Elk (there are few trees left on the coastal plateau now).  Bob caught up with us during ur third hour and we topped up our fluids and agreed to meet in Fort Ross.  The rest of the day was wearing and we were very happy to see the blue Jeep SAG vehicle on a pullout ahead around 4:30.

     Sean found lodging and planned to eat in the very small town of Jenner and Bob and I continued down the coast and inland to a pre-reserved motel in Santa Rosa. We'll leave early tomorrow morning to rejoin Sean at about 8:30 and continue on our way south.  Met no other riders today.

     In trying to reconstruct my love affair with spoke ponies (Sean's term), I keep coming back to a vague memory of coasting down a sand dune road in Nantucket on a two-wheeler, with my parents, when I was probably five or six.  At a speed of maybe twelve miles per hour, it was the fastest I had ever moved under my own power, and the thrill was overwhelming.   I bought my first English racer three-speed when I was about nine and wore it out in the three years we lived near Oak Harbor.  It was followed by a J.C. Higgins (an extremely shoddy Sears product) newsboy bike, used for that purpose both in rural Hawaii and in suburban Long Beach, delivering the afternoon papers.  I probably saw my first ten-speed, derailleur bike in 1959 and when I realized my savings could cover the $100 purchase price of a Schwinn Continental in the summer of 1960, I was hooked for life.

     Oh, as for that warped leather seat on the Continental:  it bothered my grandfather a lot more than it bothered me.  He warned me several times that it would do me bodily harm, but what did he know?  He was 70 years old, and the bike he rode from his house in Buena Park to work as a volunteer blacksmith at Knott's Berry Farm had a seat like the one on the Farmall tractor he had taught me to drive when I was eight.