I finally got started riding on CANTBIRD. I’m glad I planned a short day to begin, because it’s been raining in Southern California for most of two days. Fortunately, it did let up some of the time I was riding today. And it wasn’t super cold — high 50s all day.
David and Ann have only one car, so we had to wait until Anne got back from her appointment before David could drive me the 21 miles to the start of the southern tier bike route. But that was fine, because it gave me time to sleep in and pack up and have a good breakfast. It also gave us time to let the rain taper off.
During breakfast, David offered an idea: he said I could just hang out there all day, and he could drive me to the next town, Santee, and drop me off at the hotel. It was very generous of him, but I really wanted to get in at least a short day of riding, since I’ve been anticipating this for so long, and I wanted a short day to make sure everything worked.
So after some photos on the beach, I finally started pedaling. I rode through a lot of “free camping” areas under bridges, and made it up to Santee at about 3:00 and checked right into a cheap hotel. I was very grateful for the hotel, because by then it was cold and windy and raining and there are flood warnings all over for tonight. The good news is that even though this is a cheap hotel, it had a working hot tub! It felt great to be in the hot tub with cold rain falling on my head.
Tomorrow is the day I was originally going to do 41 miles, but it turns out that would be a 6000-foot climb. There’s no way I’m ready to do that yet in one day, hauling 95 pounds and with not much biking lately.
Here’s how the climbing now looks for the first three days, given the spacing of the towns:
Day 1: 1000 feet
Day 2: 2000 feet
Day 3: 4000 feet
That exponential growth makes me a bit nervous, but it does level off eventually and go down the other side into the desert.
In this terrain, feet of climbing is more important than miles ridden. The real bottom line is how many hours in my saddle. I try to keep it to three or four hours a day, at least for the first week of a long trip. My main fear on these trips is saddle sores, and the best way to prevent those is to limit time in the saddle.
I only wiped out once today, but it was over a curb into the street. Fortunately, nobody was coming at that time. Long story.
I’m looking forward to a solid night of sleep tonight, and I’ll probably start late tomorrow because it’s going to rain until 11 AM. So tomorrow is a very short day at only 16 miles, but it’s the only place to stop to avoid the super hard 6000 foot climb day if I combined the next two days.
Oh, one more story I forgot to tell yesterday. A guy from Germany just joined my blog. At the airport yesterday, I was standing outside baggage claim with my bike box looking for a man driving a car who I didn’t know. Then a man in a car came up to me, looking for a guy with a bike box that he didn’t know. I said David? He said Gunter? We were both wrong! Turns out that his name was Cliff, and he was searching for Gunter, who is flying in from Germany to ride the Southern Tier Bicycle Route! So I gave Cliff my Old Scouter card and told him to give it to Gunther. Now Gunther and I have connected, and maybe we’ll see each other on the route!
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Blog if you don’t use Facebook: https://oldscouter.com/
“Old Scouter” Facebook page if you want to follow this trip with more pictures and video clips: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100066334039590