Worth stopping for… a healthy, mature nopal rowing out of the top of an old Monterey Cypress stump
Brussels sprouts as far as the eye can see
From Santa Cruz I rode slowly around Monterey Bay, remembering old haunts from four decades ago. So much remained familiar, just more developed, with more bike lanes but also many more homes and much more traffic. I was close to Watsonville before the homes turned to fields of strawberries, lettuce, artichokes and Brussels sprouts. I camped at Sunset State Beach, which borders a huge industrial farming operation, and the tractors were out well before first light.
The next day I continued to Monterey, but on a whim rode up the driveway of an old rural farmhouse outside of Watsonville where a woman friend of that time had lived. To my surprise she was still there and remembered our times together. Now 74, Berta had lived alone in that same lovely old rented farmhouse for 51 years. While sharing condensed versions of our life stories from a front porch that still looked out over miles of commercial strawberry fields, we watched a bobcat stroll by the garden and slip into the trees.
I rode on, taking the scenic route around Elkhorn Slough rather than the coast highway. I had seen the bird life in this estuary in July, when I came up the Pacific Coast on Amtrak’s well-maintained Coast Starlight route, and could now see it close up.
I spent two nights at the Veterans’ Park in Monterey. This is a city-run park, rather than a more common State Park, and is the published biker/hiker camp site in Monterey in the Pacific Coast route maps. I took an extra day specifically to visit the Monterey Bay Aquarium, considered one of the finest in the world.
Sea turtle, Monterey Bay Aquarium
Pacific tuna
Jellyfish
Until I reached Santa Cruz, I had been following the route of my first long tour of forty years ago. Indeed, “I’m repeating a bicycle tour I took half a lifetime ago” became part of my “where I’m coming from/where I’m headed” introduction when meeting and greeting other tourers. The Big Sur coast, south of Santa Cruz, however, is a repeat of my first-ever tour. In June of 1971 I had just dropped out of college. Scott, another Cal Poly student (who hadn’t dropped out) and I rode the coast and back.
I write this in part because of a strong memory of an evening on Cannery Row in Monterey, where the Aquarium is located. Today Cannery Row is heavily redeveloped as a tourist destination, with restaurants and shops and bike rentals. In 1971 it was far less developed: Steinbeck’s 1945 novel of the same name had made it famous, but many of the old canneries were still just empty shells.
Scott and I found our way into one of these abandoned canneries and made our camp for the evening. After dinner we walked down to a coffeehouse where a live folk duo was playing music. We enjoyed their music so much that when they finished playing at midnight we invited them to join us in our cannery to continue the evening. They came, and we together found our way to a crow’s nest on the roof of one huge old building – my guess is that this is where someone once watched for the fishing boats to come in with their catch. We spent the next couple of hours singing Cat Stevens songs, while the full moon played over the harbor, before they went home and we went to sleep.
As best I can recall, this is what’s left of the cannery where we sang “ooh, baby, baby, it’s a wild world, it’s hard to get by just upon a smile.”
I appreciate having a completely flexible schedule. From the day I began planning for this bicycle tour, I haven’t set a date to be back home. When asked, I have spoken vaguely of “a few months”, and it has already turned out that way. I left home on July 5th, so I’m in my thirteenth week and not home yet. I was also deliberately vague about my planned route, as turned out to have been smart: I quickly learned that my planned ride of the Idaho Hot Springs Mountain Bike Route was naively and dangerously unrealistic. Completely changing my planned route and itinerary, I ended up riding these paved roads down the Pacific Coast.
The Big Sur coast is next. I’m not sure when I’ll next have wifi or cell service to post here.