Ditching The Big City, Onward To The Big Sur – San Francisco to Plaskett Creek CG

With three rested travelers, we set out from San Francisco headed south. The week of rest did my knees the power of good, relatives were visited, and we cheerfully welcomed our third touring member, Claudia, into our party. The hills out of San Francisco were definitely a change from the leisurely pedal through the Google campus we had experienced during our break, but it was good to be back on the road. Besides, the google bikes weren’t very good for hills anyways…

Right out of town, we encountered a great highway. No really, it’s name is “The Great Highway” why is it great do you ask? Well, for one thing, no cars were allowed on it the day we happened to travel down it’s smoothly paved lines. Add a 30 mile per hour tailwind on top of that and you have a very aptly named slab of concrete. It was only natural that Hugh and Claudia got their own lanes.

The first stop for the evening was in Half Moon Bay, famous for its surfing, as well as its excellent beer, courtesy the Half Moon Bay Brewing Company. The coast south of San Francisco was an interesting place, filled with much wind (finally!), and a healthy flow of cars, most of which were very courteous to us.

Natural Gas plants offer excellent photo opportunities, and great places to grab lunch on the beach! The seals were curious when I played some Ukulele, but shied away by the time we got the camera out.

The trail above leads into Monterey, CA where we stayed the night with one of Claudia’s friends. During a dip in temperatures in the region we were lucky to have housing as during the night it got down into the mid twenties for about a week. From Monterey, Big Sur beckoned.

Based on Hugh’s book of suggestions, we had the good fortune to stop at Point Lobos State park, and check out some really neat Green Algae, which looks orange due to the carotene pigment, similar to carrots.

If you ever get a chance to bicycle through Big Sur, I highly recommend it! After you enter the park, the traffic really begins to die down, though folks aren’t the most welcoming. I’m guessing they see tourists up the wazoo.

Andrew Molera was a pretty sweet campsite, except that it was totally dark when we got in. In the morning, it appeared that this would be a sweet spot to chill for a few days if you have the chance to. On the way out, there was a pretty good hill we got to push our bicycles up on our way to the road. Hugh demonstrates riding up a 7% gravel grade quite well here:

We got into Plaskett Creek Campground a bit before dark this time (yay!) and had the good fortune of meeting up with a gentleman by the name of Chris who was a fellow cycling tourist. We’ve since been on the road with Chris, and one other bicyclist, but I’ll save that for the next post. At Plaskett Creek, the wind was howling, so we went out to the bluffs to experience it in full force.

The theme continued with pesky raccoons, except that this time they went for Chris’s food, which happened to be in a not so “Raccoon Proof” Raccoon Box I snapped the below photo before heading off from the group early to go check up on living situations in Cambria.