After morning with the Telles family in Fresno, and an afternoon in the downtown, I left town with enough time to ride 30 miles before disappearing behind an almond orchard for the night.
    The following day, I rode 80 miles, cruising across the central valley and its orchards, vineyards, and various crops. Stopping frequently to talk to people (see picture in the post on the media), I was never sure whether to use Spanish or English, and conversations were generally a mix of the two. In the town of Avenal, on the far west side of the valley, over half the people I talked to spoke exclusively Spanish.
   I followed highway 33 south along the west side of the valley, with the dry coastal mountains rising to my west, and the land gave way to ranch land interspersed with orchards. I walked a half mile off the road for my campsite, and cooked my dinner in the moonlight.

   The third day I passed through an impressively long stretch of oil fields. As it was a Sunday, few people drove the road, and I felt lonely biking the gauntlet of oil pumps. I found one field of solar panels, and stopped to rest.
   After refueling in the small town of Taft (where everyone surprisingly spoke English), I climbed a 3,000 ft pass and descended to the town of Ventucopa in a high unpopulated valley of vineyards and orchards. A family kindly filled my water bottles, and I talked with a few kids for a while about life in the scenic valley. (The youngest listed the guns he owned, including one taller than he). Exhausted from the day, I pitched my tent on the valley’s edge.
    The final day was a huge climb and descent along highway 33, a road where the majority of the traffic was infrequent trucks driving to fix places where the highway had washed out. I climbed into forests to a 5,000 ft pass and descended into the Ojai valley, following a bike path to the ocean and the city of Ventura.

This entry was posted under California. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.