We woke up on Saturday to a lovely breakfast of watery coffee and packaged danishes. But even that tastes pretty good on vacation. We had a train to catch in about an hour (and a ton of gear to get to the station), so we asked the hotel clerk if we could take the free shuttle. However, she wasn't crazy about sending the airport shuttle to the train station for us, so we had to take a cab. It was no small task to cram all of our gear (and two boxed bikes) into the back of a minivan, but it all worked out just fine. (Although I'm pretty sure he took a couple extra detours to charge his own informal boxed bike charge.
We got to the station a little bit behind schedule, but it doesn't take long to check in for a train ride. The porters took our bikes, and it felt nice to know that this would be the last time that we'd have to check them for a week.
With the boxes out of the way, we headed for the platform. We were definitely excited to get on our bikes, even though I was starting to realize what I had gotten myself into with all of our gear. I wasn't so much worried about the difficulty, but I was more than a little concerned that my bike would crack in half.
The train pulled in after only a few minutes of waiting, and we hopped on for a pleasant ride to Salinas. I'm a huge fan of Amtrak, but I'll save the gushing until I write about our much longer trip back to Tucson.
We pulled into Salinas around noon on Saturday (which was also Aimee's birthday). But since I had to take our bikes down to nearly nothing in order to fit them on the plane, it took about an hour to get everything ready for the ride.
Now for a quick exercise. Take a look at these two bikes, and see if you can spot all of the differences.
If you look carefully, you'll see that only one of these bikes has multiple gears. And it isn't the one carrying a small child over the back wheel. Oh boy.
While compiling a list of all the things I won't bring on the next trip, I mounted the bags on my bike, and we took off for Monterey.
I'll be honest, the first half of the ride was a little dicey. My back wheel was developing a pretty nasty wobble, and I wasn't sure if we were going to make it to the next pay phone, let alone the next city. The second half of the ride was no less dicey, but as we got closer to Monterey, I was more and more confident that I'd be able to carry my bike the rest of the way.
As we made our way to the coast, I started to feel a lot better. That was partly because we could finally see Monterey, but probably more because it's impossible to be stressed out on a bike ride along the coast.
We pulled into Monterey around dinner time. It took us a bit longer than it should have to find the campsite, but the city was nice to explore. We eventually asked a gas station attendant where the site was, and he pointed to a gnarly hill that we had spent the afternoon trying to avoid. All I could think about was my back wheel. Even though I was way past worrying about it, the wheel was toast. It was wobbling so bad that it hit the side of my bike every time it went around. This had the same effect as squeezing the brakes (hard) every other second, and kept my max speed to something just slightly faster than walking backwards.
So, with 150 pounds pulling me backwards, and my tire-frame brake firing every second, we made our way up a textbook Northern California cliff. It was maybe a mile, tops, but that mile felt like it was 80% of the effort we out in that day. There were a few false starts (a community park on the hill cruelly resembled a campsite, but it was only there to taunt us), but we made it!
And what better way to celebrate than by heading right back down that hill! But we didn't bring the bikes this time. We left our gear at the campsite, bought a bottle of wine, and walked around the former fishing village.
This is going to be a great trip!
-M
