Aimee and I have been planning a medium-haul bike adventure for about a year, and we finally had the chance to go for it last week. There were no shortage of stories on this trip (as if there ever are with us), and I wrote them all down in a paper journal. I'll be uploading them to the blog over the next few days.
The first step of any adventure is to pick a place. For this one, Aimee and I were thinking of Northern California, since the scenery is beautiful, and it would be a great escape from the desert summer. We actually first though of Napa, but we nixed that idea as soon as we saw that the campsites there were more expensive than any hotel that either one of us had ever stayed at.
With Napa out of the picture, we thought of Monterey, a nice coastal town that I had visited with a friend several years ago. It's just South of San Jose, and it's where the Silicon Valley millionaires go to pretend that they're commercial fishers or professional sailors. It's beautiful, and it has a nice public campground just outside of the city. It looked perfect! (And aside from a little cloud cover and a nasty climb to the campsite, it was!)
So with a destination in mind and a date set, we packed our bags. Or should I say, we packed my bags. I couldn't bring myself to bolt a rack to Aimee's superlight carbon-fiber bike frame, so I vollunteered to carry all of our gear on my bike. Holy crap, was that a bad idea. But I didn't know it at the time, so I went along with the plan, and put everything we would need into a couple of borrowed panniers (thanks, Dean)!
With the gear in our bags, and the bikes boxed up, I had nothing to do put pace the hallway until Aimee got home from work. I was pretty excited for this one.
But she did get home eventually, and we headed off to the airport for a late night flight to San Jose. There weren't any major hang-ups at the airport--other than the $100 boxed bike charges--so Aimee and I headed to the bar and got a couple of pre-vacation airport beers. They always taste so good. Which was nice, since they cost almost as much as our fight.
Sometime after 10pm, we landed in the San Jose airport. We hung around the baggage claim area until the baggage handlers carted up the oversized gear. I'm used to seeing golf clubs and animal crates come up that way, but it was all bicycles and surf boards that night. This is California, after all.
My next task was to call the hotel and arrange for a shuttle. Things seemed to be going well, but I didn't have a very good phone connection, and the guy on the other end had a pretty thick Vietnamese accent. I could have sworn he said that he'd pick us up at 10:45. Around midnight, I thought that something might be off. So I called back, and someone else picked up the line and sent over a shuttle right away!
The hotel was a very pleasant, very generic airport inn, and we slept well. It would be our last bed for a week.
-M
