This day was marked by consistently great roads with generous shoulders (and a few multiuse trails).
My Seattle friends were discussing the air quality, so I took a picture of the coast and bragged about the great air quality. Then it start raining (lightly) and continued for a couple hours. I am certain bragging about the air quality caused the rain! It was warm though. I did have some headwinds for the first half of the ride, but they turned into tailwinds for the second half. By the time I finished, it was very warm and sunny!
I ran into two adventurers on highway 1 and crossed the road to chat with them. Geert and Anna are Dutch, and today was the last day of a long tour, starting with the Tour Divide, then crossing Arizona and riding up the California coast, ending at Stanford! They had some advice about a better detour around the Big Sur closure that I will investigate. It was really nice talking to them!
I saw a guy taking pictures at a little parking area on the highway, and stopped to ask what he was seeing. There were at least a half-dozen dolphins in the water, swimming very slowly up and down the beach, arcing out of the water every once in a while (I couldn’t get a picture of this!). The man I was talking to was a local surfer, and he told me that great white sharks are frequently seen there, and that something was discovered BITTEN just yesterday! I couldn’t tell what that something was over the sound of the waves. I told him not to get eaten, and have fun, in the same spirit that people tell me not to get run over on narrow highways – as if it was fully in my control! 😁
Near the end of my ride, I was forced to make a couple-mile detour around a closed bridge. I am going to see if this is a long-term closure and recommend a detour on the ACA website.
