Thursday, April 25, 2013

Ride Day 70

Today is a ride from Salt Point to Manchester a ride of about 42 miles along the coast on coastal highway  I with rolling hills and not any large grades involved.  I took my time and leisurely crawled along looking at the coast as I went and taking lots of pics.  I have no way of uploading the pics right now but I will later. 

I do feel better today.  I felt so bad in Bodega Bay that I was thinking about giving up on my planned ride  but now I think I will be able to continue if I take it easy until I get into the swing of riding a bike all day everyday.  It takes this text but won 't let me do pics.  I also have limited charge on my computer and a slow wifi that I am trying to work with so this is just a short note.

I met some interesting people in a couple of coffee shops I stopped in.  It was good to get in a bit of time with humans after my lonely night at Salt Point.  I am sitting in Point Arena right now 7 miles from my campsite at Manchester.  I wish I had enough wifi to get my stuff done.  My Garmin would not work at all.  I hope I did not lose the data from the last two days trying to upload it.  I got a fail message.  Garmin has pissed me off to no end.  I have an 800 dollar piece of high tech bs that turned itself off for no reason yesterday and I think it deleted the data but I won't know until I get a good internet hookup.  The unit comes with no manual and the downloadable one is worthless.  It is a list of features with no help as to how to use those fancy features.  The battery also goes down way too fast.  To upload the data I need highspeed internet and out here in the back woods people just aren't very concerned about that.  Frustrating to say the least.  I am going to stop now and come back at a later date to upload pics and finish my blog.  Right now I am going to go finish the last seven miles.  Enjoy life.

Ride Day 69

Yesterday I took the day off after my brutal ride from the Bay Area to Bodega Bay I was beat up.  I know it was my first day back on the road after a long break but still I was shocked by how tired I got.  Karen stayed at Bodega Bay with me and we explored the small town and surrounding area.  I enjoyed it even though I still felt very punk all day long.  The Doran Park campground was nice and quiet to boot, with lots of wildlife around.

The next morning I packed my bags and Karen gave me a ride to the edge of town and I started off again.  I took my time and rested often to make sure I would not have the cramp problems again that I had on my ride from the Bay Area to Bodega Bay.  I made it to Salt Point state park after a very enjoyable ride along the coast.  It seemed like I was climbing hills all day with the headwind combined with the rolling hills.  There was only one serious grade that I managed to get over by just resting often and enjoying the views instead of pushing myself to exhaustion again like I did earlier. 

The coastline is beautiful.  There are so many nice coves and lookouts with killer views that it gets old after a while.  I took a lot of pics which is just as indicative of how relaxed of a pace I was going for as because I wanted to take a lot of pics.  I tried to upload the pics and my Garmin profile but this internet connection will not allow me to crunch that much data so pics will have to come later.  I could shrink the pics down maybe and get them up but I just do not feel like bothering with it.  All my pics get uploaded to jimfrogs.picasawebalbums.com so you can go there to view them all.

At the campground there was no shower just a primitive camp site with water and the campground was empty except for me.  I put up my tent and rested for a while then I found a tick on me and I stripped down to look and found two more ticks.  Did I say I hate ticks yet?  They came off rather easily but I will be more careful in the future.  I did not sleep well due to pain problems but that is just part of life for me.  In the morning I saw a movement outside my tent and I raised my head up to look and a small cougar was turning tail and running away.  It put it's tail up in the air and did a quick spin and it was gone.  I wanted to go over and try to get pics of the footprints but then I thought about the ticks and I rolled back over and tried to get some more rest.  I felt much better by around 7 am.  I will ride to Manchester now.