July 11, 2010
Rode a hard 48 miles today. We started off the morning with a 11 mile ride into Miranda for a great breakfast. We had only planned on doing 4 miles before breakfast into a town called Myers Flat, but they had nothing. We had planned to meet Moses in Garberville to watch the World Cup Final, so we rolled into the city at about 12:15pm as the day was really heating up. By the time we got to the bar/café Taka looked like he was about to go down with heat stroke and I wasn’t fairing too well myself. We watched the game (Go Spain!!!!) and hung around until about 3:30 in the afternoon waiting for the heat to settle down a bit. We had about 24 miles to go from Garberville, and it was the hardest 24 miles of our trip. I don’t know how much of the difficulty arose from the terrain and how much came from the heat. Doesn’t really matter, it was tough nonetheless. Taka led the way from Garberville until we got to Standish-Hickey State Recreation Area where we’re camping tonight. This park is pretty cool; has lakes for swimming and plenty of trails for hiking, but the mosquitoes here are awful. As a matter of fact, the mosquitoes last night at the Burlington Campground were pretty awful too. My head got bit up so bad that I look like I have a horrible rash on my forehead.
We’re camping at about 1000 ft elevation tonight and will complete Leggitt Hill tomorrow morning (2000 ft elevation). Once that is done, we’ll have climbed the tallest hill of the trip. The day tomorrow is short (39 miles), but it definitely doesn’t look easy. We’ve got the massive hill in the morning and then another pretty large one right after before we finish out the day jumping from small hill to small hill.
There’s three of us at the hiker/biker site tonight; Taka/me, Moses, and another older guy that we haven’t met yet. Hopefully we’ll have some signal for our internet tomorrow so that I can update the website.
-Chris