Mike left early to catch his train back to Tucson, so I was alone again. Riding alone has a completely different feel. It's fun in some ways and less fun in other ways. I left at 8:30 and stopped in town for groceries. It felt like I was back in Denver with the numerous Hispanics in the area speaking Spanish. I rode along a road that paralleled the beach in Santa Barbara and was a bit jealous of the people playing volleyball in the sand.
The ride didn't have too many hills, but there were some very pretty mountains to the left. I passed through several smallish towns and got to Ventura, a cool-looking beach town where I stopped for lunch. There was one section of the bike trail that was closed due to construction and I had to ride and push my bike through the sand. It was a pretty horrible 100 meters.
I stopped in Oxnard for some more groceries and decided that I would go to the Starbucks nearby to use their internet. Writing this blog has been great, but it's a ton of work to write 7 blogs at a time, so I just posted 2 while I was there and would wait till later to catch up on them. There was a group of touring cyclists there and I met them. They were doing a short 4-day tour up and back from LA to somewhere 2 days north of LA.
I finally left the starbucks and made my way to my campground at Leo Carrillo State Beach. Just 3 miles before the campground I met a couple guys who rode from New Jersey and were now making their way up to San Francisco. They were pretty cool, but boy they weren't touring right, so they weren't enjoying themselves at all at this point. They just couldn't wait to get to San Francisco. They were riding really light Aluminum road bikes with light weight (and weak) wheels. They started out with camping gear, but had some wheel damage because of all the weight, so they ended up mailing their camping gear back home. That meant they were staying in hotels every single night. I can't think of a more lame way of doing a cross-country tour. Hotels are depressing and holy cow they're expensive. I have no idea how they afforded that many nights at a hotel. They asked me if I was just doing the tour for fun and then I found out that they were raising money for cancer. That was pretty awesome to hear, but they weren't in it for the fun of it at all, which was really sad. They just wanted to get from point A to point B, get the money raised, and then go home. They really didn't seem like they enjoyed touring at all, which was depressing... I said goodbye and went to my campground.
At the campground I met a fellow cyclist named Ed. He rode from Denver to Costa Rica and is going back via San Francisco!! That's quite a tour. We talked all evening. He wants to move to Costa Rica and live on a boat. He is a retired Navy Seal who was injured and retired back in 1993. It was nice talking to him for the evening. I found out that he only had 86 cents, completely broke. So before I went to bed I gave him all my extra food to help him get to pay-day. I felt sorry for him. Hopefully he'll contact me when he gets back to Denver so I can hear how the rest of his tour went.
I went to bed and slept nicely. There were apparently tree rats outside, which kind of creeped me out, but whenever I heard them I just ignored them and went back to sleep, knowing that my food was safely hanging from a tree branch.
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