Post by Ray on May 1, 2018 20:09:55 GMT -5
Everyone is fascinated by the wave action. Mary and I did that trip by car a few years ago and we took 900 pictures from Monterey to Morrow Bay!
I'm with ya, Gimp', on the sheer number of pictures.
Day 1 from Sausalito to Santa Cruz: 200 pictures. Kept about 60.
Day 2 from Santa Cruz to Monterey: 1 picture. Google had routed me the "most efficient" way to get the Monterrey instead of my taking the most scenic way to get there. Thus, the only thing I saw that day was a lot of migrant strawberry pickers. It didn't seem "right" to stand on the side of the road with my First World bicycle and snap pictures of folks stooped over picking berries.
Day 3 from Monterey to Big Sur: 1200 pictures. Kept about 300 of them.
I had penciled in doing this ride last year. But this landslide closed the Pfeiffer Canyon Bridge, cutting Highway One in half. I had read the bridge had been repaired and 1 was ready for business again.
What I didn't hear about was this much worse landslide. Or, if I had heard about it, I confused it with the first one knocking out the bridge. Two different landslides in the span of a year, both of them closing the same highway.
That Day 2 single picture above was in the home of the warmshowers.org guy I stayed with in Monterrey. One of the first questions he asked me was, "How are you going to get around the mudslide?"
"Uh . . . what mudslide?"
There was no detour around the slide. They're not going to have it fixed until the end of September 2018. There was a path some braver (foolhardier?) bicyclists were using. But it was a 7+ mile climb of nearly 2700 feet. I had nearly 50 pounds of gear with me. The grade was between 6% and 11%. There was absolutely no way I could climb that hill.
My reservation in Big Sur was at the Deetjen Inn. It was non-refundable. The section of CA-1 I wanted most to see was the section between Monterey and Big Sur. It was, "ahem," only about 40 miles. (With over 3600 feet of climb, mind you.) I made the decision to ride on down to Deetjen in Big Sur, get up the next morning, ride back to Monterey, and figure out what to do from that point. Big Sur was as far as I was going to get.
