bikes, GPS, history, MTB, roadtrip, travel, USA

Montana de Oro & Hearst Castle

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A small State park half an hour’s drive south-west of San Luis Obispo, Montana de Oro’s trails came highly recommended from Chip. Arriving at the trailhead around ten o’clock, the view of the ocean was still shrouded in that strange coastal summer fog. Still, it was sunny above & I was off following another Garmin Connect trail up a fireroad. Just as I got to the start of the East Boundary, I met another rider coming down the hill & he told that the trails had changed a bit & advised me of the best route for a two to three hour ride. I continued up East Boundary with a few switchbacks, ignoring the trails I would have taken had it not been for the good advice. The climbing was pretty easy & I started to get some good views down the valleys. Pausing briefly to let a couple of horses past I was soon going down the other side to a fireroad. This was great fun as it was a smooth trail, but with some quite substantial water bars to jump off. All too soon as I was heading for the coast, with a nice cove, on the fire road.

The local club kindly provided tools in case I wanted to do a little trail maintenance

It wasn’t long until I got off the main road & headed up the Hazzard Peak trail. At the start of this trail, the local bike club had installed a box of small cow bells – for riders to borrow to warn other trail users of fast approaching riders.

I grabbed one for the hell of it, thinking I may as well give it a go. The bell didn’t last long on the gentle climb before being stuffed in my pack. In fact, after a few minutes of downhill I was driven so maniacal by the bell, I was likely to push anyone I met off the side of trail. I continued up the climb (about 300 metres, but not as steep as Monday’s 300m climb), crossed a few of the closed old trails before reaching Hazzard Peak.

The ride off the top was fantastic, some of the most fun, flowing downhill I’ve done in quite a while. There were ample little bumps to catch some air off, some loose rocks to make it interesting & plenty of banked corners to throw the bike into. About three times there would be a tight right-hander all of a sudden & you really had to make those as the outside edge was really sandy & off-camber. The last little part of the trail was called Manzanita & was also excellent, much bigger water bars to jump over with confidence. Back at the car in less than two hours, I was pleased I went around the direction I did.

Back at the motel in SLO we hurriedly booked the last two tickets for the 3.30 tour of Hearst Castle, had lunch & set off up Highway 1 for about an hour to check out William Randolph Hearst’s sprawling complex. Seriously rich from newspapers at the beginning of the twentieth century, he & architect Julia Morgan designed & built a huge place to house his extensive European & Egyptian art collection (he bought something like twenty percent of the big European art firesale after the First World War). The castle & its three guest houses are up a five mile driveway overlooking the Pacific on a site where Hearst used to camp with his parents when he was a kid (his father having built up an extensive holding of ranching land previously).

My first impressions were that it was just a big place of someone who had too much money just throwing all sorts of very old European artifacts together & it was all a little weird. But the place grew on me & as I saw more & more of the collection & heard where various pieces were from & how staggeringly old they were. For instance, in the main living/sitting room in the house were four gigantic Flemish tapestries – these four are part of an original set of ten, only five of which remain – these must be important as the Louvre has had replicas made of all ten. It was some serious art. The last thing we saw was another pool (the outdoor one was built three times before Hearst was happy with it & had pillars next to it about two-thousand years old) built under two tennis courts. The indoor pool was for the most part three metres deep & laid with thousands of beautiful tiles, quite a few of which were coated in 22 carat gold leaf. The guest list was quite something too – Bob Hope, Churchill, Chaplin, Cary Grant, Clark Gable & Carole Lombard, Hedda Hopper, WC Fields & all sorts of others I’ve never heard off. Quite an interesting place all up – unfortunately we didn’t see any of the zebra grazing the land as we drove out. Descendants of originals that used to be in the private zoo (which also included giraffes, polar bears, kangaroos, antelope, impala & others) they have managed to stick around.

city, history, roadtrip, travel, USA

La Brea & Hollywood Boulevard

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Giving the morning peak-hour a miss (a good excuse for not getting up too early) we left San Diego behind, eventually, & headed north. Although a much shorter & quite different visit than my previous one, once again I really enjoyed my stay there – if in some horrible circumstance I had to choose a big US city to live in, I dare say San Diego would be it.

We are aiming for San Luis Obispo today on Chip’s recommendation (great riding), so that makes for 500 km/300 miles of freeway to get to the coast somewhere between LA & San Francisco. Getting through LA wasn’t nearly as bad as last time I drove from San Fran to San Diego in one day (via the Pacific Coast Highway), & no doubt the traffic would have been a lot better if we hadn’t got distracted around Hollywood. Valerie suddenly remembered that she really wanted to see the La Brea Tarpits, which really aren’t far from Hollywood Boulevard.

We knew a little about the tarpits beforehand but were blown away by just how extensive the paleontological finds were. With the biggest collection in the world (use a Clarkson voice) of fossils in the range of 11000 to 50000 years old, there really are a lot – three million, with at least as many to come from Project 23 (twenty-three big boxes excavated from a parking garage construction). There were sabre-tooth cats, mammoths, mastadons, really big sloths, a giant jaguar & on display over four-hundred dire wolf skulls. That really emphasized just how many animals got trapped in the tar. Coming up from an oilfield below the surface, the tar/asphalt/heavy oil still finds its way to the surface – you could touch some of it as you walked around the park outside the museum. The animals didn’t get trapped & then sink, they got stuck up to a few inches in before dying of starvation, dehydration, exhaustion or ending up as prey (the predators would often get stuck too, so you’d end up with so many different fossils in one big tangle). All in all a great & very interesting place to visit.

Harlan’s Ground Sloth – that’s well taller than me

Californian Sabre Tooth Cat

A Mammoth – of course

Still bubbling away – if you look closely enough in this particular picture

We headed back to Hollywood Boulevard to have a quick peak. I was staggered just how many stars there are on the Walk of Fame – but with such a long history of entertainment, I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised. Also with so many names, I didn’t recognize many of them. We also spent a bit of time checking out the hand & footprints outside the Chinese Theater before heading back to the car to hit the freeway.

Quite a bit of the first part of the 101 followed the coastline, but we had the fog to obscure our view. Since getting through Santa Barbara & giving up the driving, the road has turned north inland & the countryside is beautiful in the early evening light. Lots of rolling hills are now playing host to many vineyards – just when we’ve almost finished those six bottles from Grand Junction.

*It turns out San Luis Obispo is a really, really nice big town with beautiful scenery, lots of bars & restaurants & a great feel to it. We had Moroccan for dinner – the tangine was superb. That & the four cheese meal I had last night reminded me of a few dinners out in Auckland with ye of little Faith… I have a sneaking suspicion that I stopped for lunch in this town two years ago, the streets seem familiar somehow. It must have been when I’d abandoned the foggy Pacific Coast Highway & headed for the 101.

Yes, I was right – “Lunch in San Luis Obispo – a very nice little city & I stumbled upon a great Italian restaurant. I would have stayed the night in San Luis Obispo if I didn’t have to get back for court tomorrow as the riding is supposed to be very good.” Speaking of the riding, I’m all prepared to hit Montana de Oro State Park tomorrow – I hope the weather is fine for some great views.

Yet another sidenote – it looks like Joel & Kristy (friends from up in Canmore) are planning a roadtrip down this sort of way – might get to see some mates soon, I hope around Tahoe somewhere.

bikes, city, GPS, MTB, roadtrip, travel, USA

Moseying around San Diego

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With a long ride & a longer night to recover from, yesterday was pretty casual.  The sun managed to even come out a bit from behind the marine layer of cloud as we wandered around the Seagrove Village area of Embarcadero (downtown on the harbourside).  I left Valerie to look around the aircraft carrier USS Midway (I checked it out last time) & then took off around the bay to Point Loma & had a look around Cabrillo National Monument. The monument commemorates the first landing of a European on the west coast of the USA – by Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo of Portugal in 1542. There were good views of the North Beach Naval Air Station & its jets taking off, the city & harbour and out over the Pacific. Being on a headland to an important harbour, there was of course an old lighthouse to look around.

Not able to bring myself to have two consecutive days off the bike, I had found a nice close & short ride to attack before lunch. Heading south to Chula Vista & then east to the San Miguels I was riding at nine o’clock under a cloudy sky. Shortly after setting off, I was heading up Mt Miguel & quite rapidly. There were a lot of switchbacks, & not all were as friendly as those up San Juan on Thursday. With the rocks on some of them, they were right at the limit of my middle-ring strength but I managed to keep pushing it around. After almost 300m climbing in half an hour I was at the summit under clear skies & feeling a little warm. With the biggest cairn I’d seen in a long time, I could work out why the trail was named Rockhouse – there was what looked like the simplest rock-outlined maze next to it. I suppose if you used your imagination you could see the waist high walls as a basic house floorplan.

The ride off the peak was steeper than that up, so I was pleased to not have gone up that. The last section had a bit of service road before flattening out to loop around a smaller hill. Here I saw my first roadrunner. At least, it looked like what I thought one ought to look like. Alas, I didn’t see a coyote go flying passed with rocket-propelled shoes so I couldn’t be sure. It strutted around a bit & had a interesting call (not quite meep-meep). The trail around the hill was nice & I was enjoying the scenery. More service road (at least there were some big water bars to jump off) & singletrack mix gradually wound itself back to the car.

By the time I got back into the city, the clouds had also disappeared from there too – so we spent the afternoon wandering around city parks. Balboa Park was great in the sunshine. I stupidly left my camera behind, but as I’d been there before wasn’t too concerned. The Spanish architecture built for the 1915 Panama-Californain Exposition is just fantastic. After getting a bit of simple work done on the car, we checked out the Mt Soledad Memorial with its great panoramas of the city & then headed down to La Jolla Cove to wander around the seaside & look at the seals, sea lions & pelicans.

bikes, food, friends, GPS, MTB, roadtrip, travel, USA

Bike cleaning, great food & a big ride

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Coronado was well worth a look, as the bridge over is not far from where we are staying in San Diego. We moseyed around late Friday morning, found some great ginger beer in a Scottish shop (not quite sure what that was doing there, but the accent was great) & generally looked over the harbour at the city while chatting with a very talkative gallery owner.

The afternoon had been long ago handed over to bike maintenance at Chip’s place. My bike was still filthy from its Utah & Colorado muddy adventures & just altogether greasy. So it was great to hang out with Chip (I met & rode with him a bit last time I was here, we’ve obviously kept in touch) & pull various parts of my bike to bits. A short trip to the LBS (local bike shop) later I had been converted to a Geax Saguaro on the rear (back to tubeless, the tire was so hard to get on the rim I don’t see it coming off any time soon).  After riding on it for a day, I’m not entirely won over – it didn’t seem to give as much climbing traction as the Crossmark.

All the time I was tinkering with my bike Chip & Dale (a coincidence I assure you) had been preparing a feast for us. Over the last two years I’d got the impression that the food served around here is fantastic, so I was pleased to see this great looking barbecue in action.

The homemade bread was delicious, the barbecued chicken & ribs absolutely fantastic and the homemade strudel so good Valerie managed to down a whole one. With some good wine & a lot of travel & bike stories it was definitely the most memorable meal of the trip so far. Thanks so much for having us in your home,, Chip & Dale – I can’t say much more, I don’t want it going to your heads.

It wasn’t a late night, however, as Chip had organised a big ride for early Saturday morning. With most of an hour’s driving out of the way, nineteen of us were on our bikes by 7.45. We were riding a big loop around the Cuyamacas – I’d done this same loop (or a similar one) with a few of the same people last time, but in reverse. I’m not quite sure how we ended up with so many people, but it was fun – even if it did end up breaking up into two or three smaller groups at times.

It was a nice morning for a ride, not too hot, clear & usually there was enough breeze to keep the annoying bugs away. We ended up doing 50km/31 miles & there was a fair bit of climbing involved (1200m). I mostly sat in the back group just hanging out & cruising along in the middle ring pretending I was slower than I am – was good fun. Although a long ride, it wasn’t too technical (some short sections up required a little pushing) so I wasn’t as tired by the end of it as I expected – hungry though. I think because I’d ridden it before I didn’t end taking a lot of photos, but here are a few.

Despite having been told by many that riding the loop anti-clockwise was better, I’m not so sure. The climbing was definitely easier, but the way we went yesterday had a big downhill on a fireroad – reading my post of last time I rode here, I was definitely more excited about the down sections going clockwise. Still, it was wonderful ride – the longest of the trip so far, so that’s got to be good for the legs.

I wasn’t long home & showered & I got a text from Andrea, so I spent the evening in PB (Pacific Beach) with her & some of her friends – very nice to catch up & see a familiar Kiwi face. It was great just to be driving back into the area; the scenery is always good in PB. It turned into a bigger night than I’ve had for quite sometime (which is not altogether difficult), so I’m not sure if I’m tired from the ride or not getting to bed (couch) until late. Best thing was the lack of mugging. But the sun is out now, so we should go & explore San Diego a little more.

Biking to go places, going places to bike.