Coast

This is what an iPhone looks like after it has been run over by a pickup truck. As the screen shows, it still works.

Friday May 18 was planned to be an ambitious ride.  Our original target was to spend Thursday night 30 miles west of Santa Barbara, but we had fallen short by an hour.  So if we were still going to make it to Yosemite by dark, we needed an early start and for the day to go flawlessly.  It didn't.  But it was still a fantasy-come-true kind of day.  

We first road west from Ventura past Santa Barbara.  As we approached the northward turn, signs warned to beware of high winds in the canyon.  The campground I had wanted to stay at the previous night may have looked great on a map, but it was also directly in the path of those canyon winds. 

As we passed through Lompoc, I felt something hit the bottom of my right boot.  I looked in the rear view mirror and saw something bounce to a halt in the road just before a pickup truck ran over it.  I circled back and found my iPhone lying with a shattered face, but still working.  It had vibrated loose from its cradle in my windshied.  

We joined two other riders for a fun run through the terrain running toward Vandenberg AFB.

We missed a turn at San Luis Obispo and it turned out to be a wonderful mistake.  Rather than circle back to the missed turn ("always forward" was our motto), we instead ran up to Atascadero and down highway 41 through another beautiful canyon run.

As we approached the Hearst Castle at San Simeon, we came across a beach where elephant seals gather by the hundreds at this time of year.  Volunteers watch over the herd and give impromptu lessons about the seals to those who stop by.  The area reeked with the musky odor of this mass of blubber.

We had put nearly 2,000 miles on the bikes since we left Denver on Sunday. At long last we came to the winding stretch of coastal highway that leads to Big Sur.  The weather was perfect, traffic was light, and there were no trucks and very few RVs to stand between us and an amazing run.