Days fourteen and fifteen
It's actually middle of day 19 right now and we're enjoying down time in Eureka, CA. But I'm going to split the posts up so that pictures are more nicely displayed.
So, at the end of day fifteen I found myself in a monstrously bad mood in the Mill Creek campground in the Del Norte State park in California. After a day of continuing to take it easy, we had just finished a grueling ride from Gold Beach, OR to past Crescent City, CA.
But first of all, our ride to Gold Beach was immensely pleasant, punctuated by a stop in Port Orford to watch the World Cup at a very nice place called Port & Starboard Restaurant. There was a Dutch couple there watching the game with us, as well as a local in good humours who jollily exclaimed that watching the world cup was about as exciting as a golf tournament. The owner of the place, Frank, sat with us as well, as he was the local youth soccer coach and ref. Frank turned out to be exceedingly nice: I forgot my sandals at the bar, and he actually drove out to find us 10 miles down the road. Unfortunately, he had already handed the sandals to a pair of cyclists ahead of us, named Reid and Brian, whom we met the night before at the campsite (he must have driven past us at first).
As luck would have it, we rode past Reid and Brian later in the day, and I successfully retrieved my sandals. We met the pair again later that evening at our camp, at the turtle Rock RV resort, where we also did laundry and grilled up delicious avocado pepperjack burgers.
So the next day we took aim at California and a 60 mile ride took us there all right. At the end of the day I was very tired and sore from two disappointments. All day I had been thinking about Mexican food that we were going to get in Crescent City, but the place turned out to be closed. Then, after an unsatisfying substitute of a Subway footlong, we had to ride ten more miles to camp. More than half of those miles turned out to be at a steep uphill up a road with almost no shoulder, until finally we almost summitted about 900 feet and turned off to the campground, which plunged us back down 600 feet, so that we'd have to do the climb again next morning!
But at least we met a new cyclist named Karen at the campground, and Reid and Brian later showed up also, with Brian even more mad than me.
