Friday May 8, 2015

What a great days riding. We started the day with sunshine, but the clouds rolled in and it was a little cool. I wore my merino wool jersey and my light windbreaker, Ralf had his leggings on.

The road didn’t have much of a shoulder however, the traffic wasn’t too bad.

The scenery was stunning.

Along the route, there were warnings of rock slides. Then we came across this structure, a rock shed. A serious structure to prevent rock slides.

We certainly worked the gears on the bike today. It was a hilly ride, 922 metres of elevation gain. Although the last 3 kilometres were downhill to the State Park. As we went up and down the hills the zip on the jacket was working hard as well. As we peddled up the hills the zip came down as we got warmer working hard up the hills, as we came down the other side the zip went back up, as it was cool going down the hills.

Before Pfeiffer State Park there was a very nice looking restaurant and studio.  We were going to warm up with a coffee, but decided to carry on.  There are not many places to stop for a wild wee.

We arrived at Pfeiffer State Park at about 1:30 pm. We were directed to the hiker/biker site by a very cheerful young forest ranger.

That is me in the photo above, working on Hank.

Pfeiffer State Park has some stunning redwoods, not the gigantic redwoods as in the north but they are still very big and beautiful, they grow to about 250 feet. Whereas the northern redwoods grow to about 350 feet.

Our hiker/biker camp site was surrounded by beautiful redwoods. It was so peaceful we spotted this Stellar Jay.

We set the tent up and went back to the lodge for some lunch. It is very expensive in this area, we had considered having dinner at the lodge but decided against it. We had sandwiches and coffee for lunch instead, it was the most expensive lunch to date – $23.00.

After lunch we headed out on a walk. There were two short walks that we followed. One was to a small waterfall, and the other was to a view of the valley.

It made a nice change to walk and see some lovely scenery.

After dinner of pasta (again) we chatted to another touring cyclist who is from Fresno and cycling down to San Diego. We had a good chat with Neil about touring and bikes. He rides a recumbent and used to work in a bike shop.

Two other touring cyclists showed up, they were from Germany. We had a brief chat to them as well. They started in San Francisco and are heading down to San Diego, then renting a car to drive up to Seattle and finishing of the Pacific Coast Route by cycling back to San Francisco.