Kiki Bikes Across America

Friday, August 14th – Harris Beach State Park (Brookings), OR – Elk Prairie Campground, CA

I got up about 7am this morning with really cold feet – I didn’t have my heavy socks on and I was pretty cold for the last 30 minutes after initially waking up around 6:30. I packed up and talked to Spencer in the morning and snapped a few photos from his book so I could have an idea of the elevation profile, since the map I’m borrowing from Craig doesn’t have any elevation for the California coast. About 8:15 or so I went over to talk to the motorcyclists from British Columbia and they asked if I wanted to eat breakfast with them, so I had some oatmeal and hot chocolate with them and wound up hanging out and talking until 10:30am!

The motorcyclists from British Columbia: Ken, Deb, Jase, and Tony

I finally got going after that and rode to the California coast which was about 8-10 miles from the campground. Just before I got to the border, the two families from yesterday drove by and honked and waved at me. I caught up to them at the Oregon/California sign and rode through their ribbon that they had brought for their husbands Bob and Dave to cross when they finished their Oregon coast ride. Bob and Dave were apparently not too far behind me when I crossed over into California. They were going to end their ride there and turn around and head home.

My 13th and last state on the trip - California!

I continue on shortly after talking to Gayle and Pam and then get to Crescent City, CA which wasn’t anything spectacular. I end up going to Walmart to buy a few more supplies like cliff bars, shampoo, soap, and Heet (turns out Heet isn’t sold in California) and that was my source of fuel for my cat food can stove. So I check at ACE Hardware and they also don’t know what I’m talking about, so I figure that makes it easy – I just won’t be cooking anymore. I leave Walmart and plan to continue on riding but it’s pretty windy and then I see a Denny’s and figure, what the hell – I might as well stop for lunch since I still have the gift card Michele gave me prior to the trip. I had a bit of money left on it so wound up getting a buffalo chicken sandwich with seasoned fries – yummy energy food! I looked at the maps a bit and then chatted with a family sitting across from me and then I rolled out about 2:40pm to continue on.

Nice thing about the Pacific Coast Highway is that they at least try to watch out for cyclists in Oregon and northern CA (but not on Hwy 1)

I threw everything in low gear and started up the hill into the Redwoods National and State Parks which had a nice 1200 foot hill and several slightly smaller hills. About 12 miles from Elk Prarie State Park, I got really tired and out of energy for some reason. I was dreading the last hill (another 1,000+ foot) that I’d have to climb before descending the last 6 miles into the Redwoods again and to the campground. Once I was up and over the hill, the ride down into the Redwoods was really nice and scenic (in a different way than that which most of us think when we say ’scenic’). I was surrounded by huge trees that are thousands of years old and that are extremely huge in diameter – I don’t know what the largest is that I saw, but I tried to capture some sense of the size by putting my bike up next to the tree and taking a picture. Still, there were trees much larger than what I photographed – just impossible to show the size in a picture easily when you’re by yourself. You need like 6-10 people stretching arms and going around the tree to show the real size of these giants!

Giant Redwood with my bike up next to it to try to give some perspective on its size!

I arrived to the campground and paid my nice $3 fee for hiker/biker and had a 75 cent hot shower and set up camp and cooked with Spencer. He let me use his stove and fuel to cook my pasta which was nice since I didn’t have any other way to fix hot food. I would have just eaten my cereal and english muffins or pop tart or something in the worst case scenario. After dinner, I went to my tent and tried to work on my journal for a bit, but fell asleep almost on the computer and didn’t want my battery to die on me while I slept, so I woke up enough to turn the computer off and crawl in my sleeping bag for the night. Tonight I put my hat on and even got inside the sleeping bag liner since it was so chilly.

GPS Stats:
63.4 miles
36.6 max speed
11.7 avg speed
05:25 moving time

Computer Stats:
64.67 miles
37.5 max speed
11.9 avg speed
05:25:26 moving time