Today was a long, hard day of riding. I couldn't find the campground that I had picked out on the map and it was getting too dark to ride so I stopped for the night at a Ramada Inn in Santa Cruz, California. The room is much more pricey than I would normally go for, but I was getting desperate. At least it's a nice room with wireless Internet access.
When I pulled into Santa Cruz at about quarter to 9 I told myself that I would stop at the first hotel that I saw and stay there as long as the room was less than $100. The Ramada was asking $99. The funny thing is that when I went out for dinner I walked past 3 hotels in a two block radius that were almost certainly cheaper. I guess that's the price of being impatient :)
I took a look at the map that I have on the computer and realized that the campground that I was looking for wasn't even located on the highway that I was driving along. I picked the campground by looking at my Harley map which doesn't have a lot of detail. On that map it looked like the campground was right off of Hwy 1.
The highlight of the day was seeing and then driving across the Golden Gate bridge. I stopped briefly at the Golden Gate National Recreation Area visitors center to pick up a National Park map for the area. Ironically I was originally going to camp there but I figured that I would press on a little further to get south of San Francisco so that I didn't have to deal with the morning traffic.
Speaking of traffic, I really wasn't thinking when I planned my ride today. I arrived in the San Francisco area right around 5 P.M. just in time for the worst of the evening rush hour. I feared for my life once or twice as I rode through a city full of crazy people. I'm kidding. The people weren't that crazy, it was just difficult to adjust to driving in city traffic after riding 3500 miles through backroads.
Most of the riding that I did for the rest of the day was unspectacular. There were some pretty areas on the coast but I think that the Oregon coast was prettier. It was certainly more green in Oregon, whereas the California coast south of Eureka seemed kind of dry and brown.
I also decided today that there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. Normally I like really twisty roads but after about 20 miles on the Shoreline Hwy I was getting a little tired of the twisties. I was spending all of my time focusing on the road and was having a difficult time just enjoying the scenery.
The ride when something like this: speed up, shift up, shift up, slow down, shift down, lean, shift down, accelerate, shift up, slow down, shift down, lean, etc. I think that it was particularly tense considering that the road was kind of narrow and, in a lot of places, didn't even have a barrier to keep you from falling a couple of hundred feet into the ocean below.
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