The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

The first improbability about Las Vegas is that it exists at all. The second is that its name means 'the meadows'.

As we approached it after dark, heading East across the desert, there seemed absolutely no likelihood that a city could exist in the middle of such a desolate area. More pertinently it was impossible that something as lush as a meadow was on the cards. It was all very Wild West. Vast and empty and harsh.

We were heading in the Ford 'Escape' to seek out the riches of this town as part of our six day frolic through the sunny sillinesses of the south western USA. We had visited Disneyland, we were going to Vegas and our final stop was going to be LA. We were enjoying ourselves at the end of our cycling and I was excited to visit Vegas since I had never really seen it.

And I wasn't at all convinced that I was going to now! I really couldn't imagine it being there. However just after we crossed the state line into Nevada from California we got our first hint that a sizable inhabitation was round the corner.

Of Mice and Men

"To all who come to this happy place: Welcome. Disneyland is your land. Here age relives fond memories of the past, and here youth may savor the challenge and promise of the future. Disneyland is dedicated to the ideals, the dreams, and the hard facts that have created America, with the hope that it will be a source of joy and inspiration to all the world."
—Walter E. Disney, July 17, 1955 4:43pm

When I was young every child I knew wanted to go to Disneyland.

In the United Kingdom of the 70's however that privilege was reserved for a very select few since it was so far away and so incredibly expensive to get to that only the children you loathed ever got to go. Now of course there is a park just a hop and skip from Paris, and visiting Disneyland is rivalled by all sorts of other amusement parks based on other themes and filled with rides more dramatic and daring than anything it offers.

However, Disneyland California was the second most visited themepark on earth in 2009, second only to Disneyworld in Florida, and nearly 16 million people went. So it still has a bit of cache and I was still VERY excited at the prospect of going when we stopped cycling.

SoCal - So Cool

We've both been a tiny bit conscious, as we've blogged our way through a decent chunk of the Americas this year, that reading our missives our trip may have seemed a bit black or white.  Either we've been enduring abject misery through wind, cold, altitude or lack of decent ice cream; or it's been one long, unremitting whirl of gobsmacking scenery, delectable people, once-in-a-lifetime experiences and the world's best ice cream.  To some degree, we have indeed tried to focus on the more 'interesting' bits, so that has probably come through.  Whilst everything we write is absolutely true, we certainly try to make the subject matter worth reading.

In the case of Southern California, however, even if you wanted to you simply couldn't exaggerate its wonders.

Sideways

I think we have mentioned before that for the Pacific Coastal route we had special maps. Maps published by the Adventure Cylcing Association. They told us exactly which road to take, how many miles things were and what services we would pass on the way. More or less we followed their suggested route.

And then shortly after a place called Lompoc we ignored them. We turned left, we went off piste, we went sideways.

We had heard from our friends Garth and Dee of an alternative route to Santa Barbara through the Santa Ynez Valley. This valley was famous for its vineyards. It was the wine country that had featured in the film 'Sideways'. We were promised beautiful rolling hills, row upon row of grapes and one nasty climb out of the valley and back to the coast.

We had been coast hugging for a while and so we felt ripe for a change. Especially when we realised that the route the maps were suggesting was on a reasonably busy section of Highway 101, which would in places become a freeway, and was inland anyway.

In a Big Sur state of mind

A lot is written about Big Sur.

An awful lot.

A lot is said about it too.

When people found out that we were cycling down the US west coast almost without exception they asked, "Are you going down Big Sur?" Sometimes this question would be followed by a tale, their eyes would light up, their face would become all aglow and they would tell us about the time they too went down Big Sur. Sometimes they had travelled in an open top car, sometimes they had gone by motorbike, occasionally they had gone by bike. "It's beautiful", "It's awesome", "It's stunning" - that was the sort of thing they said.

Waxing lyrical (or lyrical-ish) about this sparsely populated, slightly undefined mountainous region where the Santa Lucia range bursts straight out of the Pacific was clearly de rigueur. Shortly before actually hitting this mythical and fabled section of the road I decided to look it up in the guidebook. This gave it the grandest write up of all. It described Big Sur as 'a state of mind'.

Two diners in one day

We can get very hungry on this trip.

The food monster can catch us unawares at any point. And even though we try and stave it off with a hearty breakfast, a decent size lunch and a several course dinner it can still overwhelm us, causing us to lurch into our panniers rabidly and reach for Lord only knows how many Haribo gummy bears, oat and honey cereal bars or gigantic fistfuls of peanuts.

It seems to really let rip however on our days off. Then we have been known to consume quite obscene numbers of calories in a bid to quiet its stomach growling, light headedness making, jelly leg wobbling rapaciousness.

A case in point, our 'sightseeing' day in San Francisco.

Standing on the shoulders of giants

Do you remember the Cadbury Flake adverts from the 1980s? A woman reclines in a wonderfully bubbly bubble bath, lying back and really luxuriating in it and then reaches for the ultimate indulgence, a deliriously crumbly, flakey milk chocolate bar that Cadbury have cunningly crafted in the shape of a log.

Well, I felt like that woman when I woke up the other morning in a treehouse.

I was not, of course, in a bath at forty seven feet above the ground (although we did have a fully functioning shower suite in this treehouse). Nor was I eating chocolate first thing in the morning (although that isn't impossible) but rather I was luxuriating in splendour and I was eyeing up with gobsmacked awe a real log of rather more epic proportions.

Phil and I were being treated by the neverendingly lovely Nancy Blessing to a night at her 'favourite treehouse hotel'.

Now, that is a good statement to start with. To have visited a treehouse hotel at all is fairly unusual, but to have a 'favourite' one is pretty splendid and then to be lovely enough to treat us, and my Mum and Dad, to a visit to it confirms Nancy as one of the absolute highlights of our trip.

And so it was that Phil and I found ourselves spending a night in the 'Majestree'.This was one of several treehouses in the 'Treesort' of 'Out N' About', inland from the Oregon Coast up the gloriously forested Smith River.

Pioneers and Adventurers

We have had both good maps and bad maps on this trip.

Some have been driving atlases with big scale bare-bones information, some have been topographical plans indicating worrying climbs or thrilling descents and some have been drawn on little scraps of paper by helpful locals and more or less accurate depending on their knowledge.

We spend hours looking at them and trying to work out which route to take calculating how different maps compare. We try to work out distances, where major stops should be, what might be viable in any one day and what we will pass en route that we might want to stop at. It is one of our most basic activities. We look at our route maps every single day.

We have had some hilarious nonsenses. In Bolivia and Peru the maps we used often indicated places that no longer existed (or perhaps never actually existed at all) and utterly failed to mention others that were significantly large and very definitely there. So we have always had to use several maps and supplement them with internet research and local knowledge and a healthy dose of guess work. No one map ever did it all.

Until now that is.

We're in Quite a State.

[I do hereby declare that I am in no way receiving financial or other remuneration from the Oregon Tourist Board for the words laid out below - honest!]

I am sitting in a duplex apartment in Port Orford, 70 miles North of the Californian border.  Through the windows, I am watching small fishing boats bobbing as they await winching by crane into their 'dry' harbour.  Behind them, the Pacific: fringed by rugs of pine forests, it is studded with giant lava stacks surging out of the water and speckled with frisky white horses.  Late afternoon sunshine is bathing the whole scene in gentle light.  And in amongst the whole scene jets of water are spurting periodically from the backs of giant grey whales, surfacing during their 12,000 mile migration South from the Arctic to Mexico.  They are just a few hundred yards away.  We keep seeing them.  It's a tough gig, this long distance cycling game.

Blessings

It is 6.15pm.

We are cycling towards a campsite in a Washington State Park.

We had hoped to be there by now.

We still have 15 miles to go.

We are slightly wearily realising that we are probably going to have to bike the last part of the day in the dark, pitch our tent in the dark and make our dinner in the dark.

We are girding our loins to be stoic and hardy.

A lady flags us down.

Vaneattle and Seacouver

And so to North America...

We arrived in Seattle nearly two weeks ago now, and have been soaking up just about as much of the USA's Washington State and Canada's British Columbia as a fortnight would allow.  We spent more than seven months in Latin America in the end.  But our madcap rush to Lima, the epic 31 hour bus journey to Ecuador, and our final few extraordinary days in the Galapagos Islands, meant that the emotions, impressions and impact of our transition to the Northern Hemisphere have taken a while to form.

Certainly, as we sweatily rushed about Guayaquil airport late into the evening, wrapping bike boxes and negotiating seat allocations with Galapagos sand still between our toes, there was little opportunity for reflection.  Even on Delta's excellent (business class for barely more than economy!) flights to Atlanta and then on to Seattle, we were still rather zombied out.

Suddenly, there we were in the Seattle Airport arrivals area - confronted by trolleys costing the same $4.00 to rent as dinner for two on the Bolivian altiplano, and a taxi ride into town costing the same as a 31 hour international bus journey.  Even in our sleep deprived state, this was a wake up call.  The gentle metaphorsis that we had originally envisaged as we moved serenely from South, through Central, and into North America had suddenly mutated into an instantaneous cultural caffeine fix in a mere puff of jetfuel.