My first bicycle tour was a nine day ride from Portland Oregon to Palo Alto, California at the end of the summer of 1999.
That first ride got me hooked on bicycle touring, and in the past ten years I’ve biked across the country twice and then also from Palo Alto to the tip of South America.
But when I biked from Palo Alto to the tip of South America, I biked inland to visit the Central Valley so that I could talk to farmers about water issues and also get attention for climate change in Fresno.
But this route meant that I skipped the coast. This past weekend, I biked along the coast from Monterey to Santa Barbara in three days (240 miles), thus cycling the only stretch of the Pacific Coast that I had not yet ridden. It may have been the most beautiful stretch of the entire west coast. I especially liked the stretch of road south of Big Sur, where the coastal mountains rise directly from the water.