Category Archives: United States

The last 2km through San Ysidro, the Amer­i­can side of the bor­der, took me past a huge shop­ping mall. I stopped at a Star­bucks for a last cof­fee, not know­ing if cof­fee cul­ture had improved in Mex­ico from Nescafe to ground cof­fee. It was 11 years since I’d been there. For the first time on […]

Mike Kraft had described south­ern Cal­i­for­nia as ‘traf­fic and beaches’. He was pretty accu­rate as both com­bined for my road rage inci­dent of the trip. I headed out of Hunt­ing­ton Beach along the PCH, passed through New­port Beach and was cycling along the short main street in Laguna Beach, when I heard a car horn […]

Santa Mon­ica was a wealth, pristinely clean town, with lit­tle char­ac­ter but a big home­less prob­lem. Each of the US cities I’d passed through had a size­able home­less prob­lem, but none as evi­dent as warm and sunny Santa Mon­ica. If I’d fallen through the net in Amer­ica, I’d be in just such a place. It […]

After my hard work from the day before, I had a late start – the cof­fee fil­ter, comfy chair and small group stay­ing at the hos­tel were too much of a draw to get me on the road before mid­day. A French-Canadian cou­ple were dri­ving down to South­ern Argentina and, Anna, the hos­tel man­ager had […]

I just about made it out of the Safe­way car park in one piece. In the space of 30 sec­onds, two dri­vers nearly backed out into me while look­ing over their left shoul­ders for traf­fic com­ing from the right. I saw the sec­ond tak­ing a turn badly a few min­utes later, mobile phone in hand. The […]

Santa Cruz will go down in my mem­ory as the only place I have so far got really lost in. I picked up the Pacific Coast Cycle Route from the hos­tel and then the signs dis­ap­peared. Cyclists are not allowed on the Free­way until about 25km south of the city so I headed towards the […]

A hill is a hill is a hill. I have got so used to see­ing them that they barely reg­is­ter any­more – that is unless it is a hill like Devil’s Slide, espe­cially when it’s foggy. Sit­u­ated about 35km south of San Fran­cisco, Devil’s Slide inter­rupted an essen­tially unevent­ful ride that had started along the […]

Almost A Fes­ti­val My time in San Franc­sico began and ended with a fes­ti­val. After chat­ting for a bit with Mike and Suzie, Mike and I cycled the cou­ple of miles through Golden Gate Park — the Sum­mer of Love site — to the annual free TOUR DE FAT Bicy­cle Fes­ti­val. A bike parade, food and […]

The weather for the five days it took me to get to San Fran­cisco was clear blue skies for the most part, a light tail wind and tem­per­a­tures of around 20–25 Cel­si­ius — not bad for the end of Sep­tem­ber. The sign at the junc­tion of High­ways 101 and 1 warned me of the climb ahead. For […]

Cycling along the road south of tiny Orick and north of the fish­ing vil­lage of tiny Trinidad I noticed  a herd of wild elk wan­der­ing through an RV park. They were hap­pily chomp­ing away on the local grasses – not the widely-grown marijuana-type whose smell per­me­ates the air in such towns – when the leader of the herd […]