Category Archives: city

city, friends, history, roadtrip, travel, USA, vehicles

Alcatraz

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Tuesday was another day on the waterfront in San Francisco. After a completely avoidable & regrettable communication breakdown, we met Kristy & Joel just in time to get on our booked 9.30 ferry to the Rock. Strangely, the Bay area had served up a consecutive fantastic day & it was a most pleasant short ferry ride out to Alcatraz. A very popular place to visit, I didn’t find it too crowded to get a good look around. It’s an odd island – such a beautiful setting in the gateway to the San Francisco bay with great views all around on such a day, plenty of flowers that you wouldn’t expect & a lot of birdlife (no predators). All this is contrasted markedly with it really just being a big, mostly desolate, rock with a huge old crumbling relic of a prison sitting on top.

With its history of being an army fort guarding the bay, then an army prison, then a federal penitentiary before the site of an Indian occupation & finally becoming part of the National Park system, I was fascinated. Of course, the biggest focus of the island today is the former maximum security cell block – the audio tour (the first I’ve done this trip) voiced by former guards & inmates is really well done. The cells, except solitary confinement for some reason, were smaller than I expected. It seemed as though life there was for the most part rather routine & quiet, with good meals & hot showers (so prisoners wouldn’t get acclimatized to cold water & think a swim across the bay was a good idea). Still, with the city tantalizingly close it must have been torture. The 1946 riot & various escape attempts were well detailed, as was life on the island for the children of the wardens.

Back on the mainland, we enjoyed a nice long lunch of clam chowder in sourdough bread bowls on Fisherman’s Wharf catching up about roadtrips & life in Canmore. Leaving Joel & Kristy to explore Pier 39 we headed back to the historic ships that we didn’t get the chance to wander around on Saturday. The Eureka was a big old wooden-hulled (one of the largest left) ferry from the days before the big bridges around the Bay Area. It reminded me a lot of one I went on in San Diego two years ago – there was nice little collection of old vehicles on it too. I found the most interesting to be the Balclutha – a big old three-masted sailing ship that plied quite a few different routes over its long life – curiously it used to take a lot of Californian Douglis fir to Australia for the construction of the Broken Hill mines (there’s a tenuous link to my old job at Bluescope Steel there somewhere). There was a neat little old red tug tied up – reminded me of Little Golden Books for some reason. Leaving Joel & Kristy to explore the city a little more, we returned to the hotel to do a few errands before we met for dinner.

bikes, city, GPS, MTB, roadtrip, travel, USA, vehicles

Soquel Demo & San Fran

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Quite a few people (real & internet) had been raving about the riding just north of Santa Cruz – so I decided to check out the Soquel Demonstration Forest on our way north to San Francisco yesterday. Ducking off the highway onto Summit Rd, it was a long winding drive through some quite dense forest to the trailhead. I was fortunate to have Valerie drop me at the start of the fireroad (generally, you park at the bottom & ride up the road & then a fireroad until you get to the top of the ridge – then taking one of a number of singletracks back down to more fireroad to get back up to the parking lot).

The forest was beautiful – I haven’t seen such big (girth) trees for many, many months. There were quite a few redwoods around. It was a long monotonous ride up & a very fast looking local pointed me in the direction of the singletrack down. He told me that the famous Tractor trail would be logged (& therefore closed) on Monday & recommended I did it. It was a while along the Ridge trail before hitting Tractor. It was great fun down, with some quite fast bits & some nice banked corners. I remembered having a big smile on my face for that part. Then I hit the fireroad back up to the parking lot. Maybe I’ve been spoilt with all the riding (hope I’m not becoming a singletrack snob), maybe I’m a little worn out or maybe the lack of a big American sized meal the night before did it – but this part was exceedingly boring & long. In the end, I didn’t think all the boring fireroad climbing (over 800m in just over ninety minutes) was worth it for such descents. I had planned to go around the loop twice more, but just couldn’t face it. Can you believe my apathy was so great, I didn’t even bother to take a single photo all day?!

As Valerie hadn’t been to San Fran before, we pretty much spent the day wandering around the waterfront (Ferry Building, Pier 39, Fisherman’s Wharf, Maritime National Historic Area) & then up in to the suburbs a bit. It was much as I remember it – beautiful, touristy, busy (great markets around), sunny, foggy, windy, cold. We walked up a few steep hills & managed to walk down the Crookedest Street in the World part of Lombard St & marvel at the chaos as so many tourists drove down. We stumbled across the vibrant North Beach Fair (one of the city’s largest, apparently) on our way to the very large Chinatown. One of the highlights of me just strolling around letting Valerie explore was the many vintage streetcars that are still rolling around the city streets – they are great looking machines.

city, history, roadtrip, travel, USA

La Brea & Hollywood Boulevard

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Giving the morning peak-hour a miss (a good excuse for not getting up too early) we left San Diego behind, eventually, & headed north. Although a much shorter & quite different visit than my previous one, once again I really enjoyed my stay there – if in some horrible circumstance I had to choose a big US city to live in, I dare say San Diego would be it.

We are aiming for San Luis Obispo today on Chip’s recommendation (great riding), so that makes for 500 km/300 miles of freeway to get to the coast somewhere between LA & San Francisco. Getting through LA wasn’t nearly as bad as last time I drove from San Fran to San Diego in one day (via the Pacific Coast Highway), & no doubt the traffic would have been a lot better if we hadn’t got distracted around Hollywood. Valerie suddenly remembered that she really wanted to see the La Brea Tarpits, which really aren’t far from Hollywood Boulevard.

We knew a little about the tarpits beforehand but were blown away by just how extensive the paleontological finds were. With the biggest collection in the world (use a Clarkson voice) of fossils in the range of 11000 to 50000 years old, there really are a lot – three million, with at least as many to come from Project 23 (twenty-three big boxes excavated from a parking garage construction). There were sabre-tooth cats, mammoths, mastadons, really big sloths, a giant jaguar & on display over four-hundred dire wolf skulls. That really emphasized just how many animals got trapped in the tar. Coming up from an oilfield below the surface, the tar/asphalt/heavy oil still finds its way to the surface – you could touch some of it as you walked around the park outside the museum. The animals didn’t get trapped & then sink, they got stuck up to a few inches in before dying of starvation, dehydration, exhaustion or ending up as prey (the predators would often get stuck too, so you’d end up with so many different fossils in one big tangle). All in all a great & very interesting place to visit.

Harlan’s Ground Sloth – that’s well taller than me

Californian Sabre Tooth Cat

A Mammoth – of course

Still bubbling away – if you look closely enough in this particular picture

We headed back to Hollywood Boulevard to have a quick peak. I was staggered just how many stars there are on the Walk of Fame – but with such a long history of entertainment, I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised. Also with so many names, I didn’t recognize many of them. We also spent a bit of time checking out the hand & footprints outside the Chinese Theater before heading back to the car to hit the freeway.

Quite a bit of the first part of the 101 followed the coastline, but we had the fog to obscure our view. Since getting through Santa Barbara & giving up the driving, the road has turned north inland & the countryside is beautiful in the early evening light. Lots of rolling hills are now playing host to many vineyards – just when we’ve almost finished those six bottles from Grand Junction.

*It turns out San Luis Obispo is a really, really nice big town with beautiful scenery, lots of bars & restaurants & a great feel to it. We had Moroccan for dinner – the tangine was superb. That & the four cheese meal I had last night reminded me of a few dinners out in Auckland with ye of little Faith… I have a sneaking suspicion that I stopped for lunch in this town two years ago, the streets seem familiar somehow. It must have been when I’d abandoned the foggy Pacific Coast Highway & headed for the 101.

Yes, I was right – “Lunch in San Luis Obispo – a very nice little city & I stumbled upon a great Italian restaurant. I would have stayed the night in San Luis Obispo if I didn’t have to get back for court tomorrow as the riding is supposed to be very good.” Speaking of the riding, I’m all prepared to hit Montana de Oro State Park tomorrow – I hope the weather is fine for some great views.

Yet another sidenote – it looks like Joel & Kristy (friends from up in Canmore) are planning a roadtrip down this sort of way – might get to see some mates soon, I hope around Tahoe somewhere.

bikes, city, GPS, MTB, roadtrip, travel, USA

Moseying around San Diego

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With a long ride & a longer night to recover from, yesterday was pretty casual.  The sun managed to even come out a bit from behind the marine layer of cloud as we wandered around the Seagrove Village area of Embarcadero (downtown on the harbourside).  I left Valerie to look around the aircraft carrier USS Midway (I checked it out last time) & then took off around the bay to Point Loma & had a look around Cabrillo National Monument. The monument commemorates the first landing of a European on the west coast of the USA – by Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo of Portugal in 1542. There were good views of the North Beach Naval Air Station & its jets taking off, the city & harbour and out over the Pacific. Being on a headland to an important harbour, there was of course an old lighthouse to look around.

Not able to bring myself to have two consecutive days off the bike, I had found a nice close & short ride to attack before lunch. Heading south to Chula Vista & then east to the San Miguels I was riding at nine o’clock under a cloudy sky. Shortly after setting off, I was heading up Mt Miguel & quite rapidly. There were a lot of switchbacks, & not all were as friendly as those up San Juan on Thursday. With the rocks on some of them, they were right at the limit of my middle-ring strength but I managed to keep pushing it around. After almost 300m climbing in half an hour I was at the summit under clear skies & feeling a little warm. With the biggest cairn I’d seen in a long time, I could work out why the trail was named Rockhouse – there was what looked like the simplest rock-outlined maze next to it. I suppose if you used your imagination you could see the waist high walls as a basic house floorplan.

The ride off the peak was steeper than that up, so I was pleased to not have gone up that. The last section had a bit of service road before flattening out to loop around a smaller hill. Here I saw my first roadrunner. At least, it looked like what I thought one ought to look like. Alas, I didn’t see a coyote go flying passed with rocket-propelled shoes so I couldn’t be sure. It strutted around a bit & had a interesting call (not quite meep-meep). The trail around the hill was nice & I was enjoying the scenery. More service road (at least there were some big water bars to jump off) & singletrack mix gradually wound itself back to the car.

By the time I got back into the city, the clouds had also disappeared from there too – so we spent the afternoon wandering around city parks. Balboa Park was great in the sunshine. I stupidly left my camera behind, but as I’d been there before wasn’t too concerned. The Spanish architecture built for the 1915 Panama-Californain Exposition is just fantastic. After getting a bit of simple work done on the car, we checked out the Mt Soledad Memorial with its great panoramas of the city & then headed down to La Jolla Cove to wander around the seaside & look at the seals, sea lions & pelicans.