The four of us talked for three hours—mostly about the state and national parks the Marstons recommended that we visit while we pedaled through America—before Larry and I walked back to our campsite to pack up and start pedaling again. The headwinds had died down, but we were too sore to go very far today; we decided to cycle only as far as Limekiln campground, seven miles up the road.
As we started to take down our tent one of the other campers, Pete Olsen, a middle-aged fireman from Los Angeles, came over to see what we were all about. Pete stood next to the picnic table and surveyed the mountain of clothing and gear stacked on top of it. Since we had packed everything wrong the day we left Santa Barbara, putting things we wouldn’t be using very often on top of the things we would, we had had to pull everything out of our panniers to get at what we needed the night before and that morning.
“Bet you two can’t get all that stuff back into your packs now that you’ve yanked it all out,” Pete said as he eyed our books, camera, clothes, sack of toiletries, towels, tools, spare parts, cookset, silverware, candle lantern, and the two bottles of champagne our friends had given us at the station in Santa Barbara. “You must be new at this. Where you off to?”
“Around the world,” I answered sheepishly, trying to stand up straight without wincing in pain. “Yesterday was our first day.”
Pete didn’t say anything, but I could almost hear his mind at work: You mean you two pitifully disorganized kids, who could just barely limp into the campground last night—one of you collapses inside your tent while the other one screams at your stove which you never did get to work—and who today, after only one day on the road, are too sore to pedal more than seven miles, are going to stand there and tell me you’re gonna bicycle around the world? Around the world with a busted cookstove and two bottles of champagne. Well, good luck to you both. You’ll need it and a lot more!
Pete took another good look at everything on the table, then shook his head and walked away.
At the store in Pacific Grove Larry and I picked up a gasket for our cookstove and supplies for lunch and dinner before we pedaled on to Limekiln. We pitched our tent among the ferns and pines and spent the day walking the beach and hiking in the hills and along the stream that flowed past our campsite. There were showers at Limekiln, and at the end of the day we soothed our aching muscles in the hot water and washed away the layers of dirt and sweat that the previous day’s ride had encased us in. For dinner we cooked macaroni and cheese from a box and broke out the champagne. We were sound asleep by eight o’clock.
It took us three days to pedal the 135 miles from Limekiln to Larry’s parents’ house in San Jose. Each morning I started out slow—sore and stiff from the day before—and by midafternoon, after we had pedaled about thirty miles, I would slow down even more, almost to a crawl, as the brigade of sharp pains marched through more of my muscles and the butcher knife sliced deeper into my left shoulder.
Every afternoon I was drained of all my energy. Every incline looked like Mount Everest, and I kept checking my tires to see if they were flat, thinking maybe that was why I was going so slow. Even when I pedaled downhill, I had to struggle. The last ten miles of each day were sheer agony for me, and every night I felt thoroughly discouraged. I would pull out my map while we ate dinner, study the tiny stretch of mileage we had covered that day, then compare it to our projected route across North America and wonder how we would ever make it the six thousand miles we expected to pedal on our way to the East Coast.
“Now don’t get totally disillusioned right off. It takes a while, but you’ll get in shape,” Larry would say to me at night. “It’s just that you’re not accustomed to bicycling over about fifteen miles a day, and all that extra weight makes it even tougher. Give yourself a break. You’ve only been at this for a few days now. It’ll probably take you a month or so before you’re in good enough shape to whiz through a forty- or fifty-mile day or crank out an eighty-miler. And besides, I don’t think you’re eating enough. You’re burning up a lot of calories and you’re building up muscles, so you need to eat a lot more than you normally do. I think some of your exhaustion probably has to do with you just plain running out of fuel.”
When we got to San Jose I weighed one hundred seven pounds, eight pounds below my normal weight and three pounds less than what I had weighed on May 14. I felt weak, and for the first few days that we stayed with Larry’s parents I spent most of my time eating and sleeping. But by the end of a week I was revitalized and even anxious to start out again.
On May 28, Larry and I left San Jose and continued north on Highway 1. Larry’s parents were apprehensive about what our journey might have in store for us, but they were excited for us too.
“Do it now while you can,” Larry’s father whispered to us the day we left. “But be sure to be careful and take care of each other. And call us as often as you can while you’re still in the States.”
IT WAS A STRENUOUS RIDE up the coast through Sonoma and Mendocino counties. For five days the road bounced up and down the steep coastal mountains. But the coastline and the countryside were beautiful, and I soon found myself paying less attention to my aches and pains and more attention to my surroundings. We wound our way around the countless deserted coves and bays of the Pacific. The shiny turquoise waters were dotted with rocky outcroppings where the seagulls made their homes. Sometimes the road turned inland for part of a day, and then we sailed over rolling hills and grassy farmland. The coast was sparsely populated, and we pedaled to the sounds of the wind and the waves and the sea birds. The people in the few settlements along the highway were proud of their scenic, isolated land and determined to keep it that way.
“Yep,” smiled the owner of the single-room general store in Elk, a don’tblink-or-you’ll-miss-it burp on the map just south of the town of Mendocino, “us folks like it just fine the way it is up here—lots of rugged, unspoiled coastline, open spaces, and not many people. Down south it’s too crowded and filthy and noisy. There’s nothing but cement and asphalt and people down there. Yep, I had my choice some years back. I could either buy a store in Los Angeles and live in that endless asphalt jungle and worry all the time about gettin’ robbed or mugged and spend my time driving on freeways getting to and from work every day, or I could buy this place here. So I came on up here to take a look at the place, and I never left.
“Now, I just sit here and look out over the Pacific and breathe in the fresh salt air and laugh out loud every time someone from L.A. comes in here and asks me how the blazes I can stand living in the middle of nowhere. Just as soon as they ask me that I always ask ’em how the smog’s been in L.A. And when they start to get all defensive, I just smile and say, ‘Well, I gotta admit, we got our smog problem up here in Elk too. Why, just the other day a tourist came through and lit up a cigarette, and the health officials declared a first-stage smog alert!’”
When we set out from San Jose I decided to give Larry’s suggestion that I eat more and more often a try. Instead of eating only one meal between breakfast and dinner, as I had between Morro Bay and San Jose, I started eating three. We began each day with a huge breakfast—we’d wolf down six scrambled eggs with cheese, half a loaf of bread, two bowls of granola, and three or four cups of hot tea. We’d pedal on that for a couple of hours, then around ten o’clock we would pick up a morning snack—donuts covered with chocolate, caramel, or powdered sugar; or a pound cake washed down with a quart of chocolate milk. Each noon we built ourselves a couple of cheese, tomato, and salami sandwiches to go with our fruit and cookies. That would hold us until three or four o’clock when we went for the chocolate candy bars and soft drinks. If we were pedaling through a big town, we always hit the local A&W for a rootbeer float or a frostie. For dinner we dumped a can of beef stew, chop suey, or enchiladas, or a package of macaroni and cheese, into one of our bowls and a can of corn or green beans into the other and called it dinner. Our canned-food dinners were anything but nutritious, but they were quick and easy to fix. We survived on them and our junk-food