A group of our friends was waiting at the station to see us off. Cary Holst, a friend who would later join us in Scotland, broke out a bottle of champagne after we rolled up, and everyone laughed and joked and snapped pictures. And then it was time to leave, and I was immediately homesick. I could barely see through my tears while my friends hugged and kissed me good-bye. I started to step up into the train, but then I stepped back and grabbed a friend’s hand.
“I’m scared, Ann,” I blurted. “I feel so alone, so unsure and without any—I don’t know exactly how to describe it—without any supports or foundations I guess. After the ride here, bicycling twenty thousand miles sounds impossible. I don’t think I can go through with this.”
I began backing away from the train. But Ann smiled and gently pushed me forward.
“You’ll do it,” she said. “Just remember that you can do anything you really set your mind to, anything. You’ll do it all right. I know you will.”
I squeezed Ann’s arm and climbed up the steps.
As the train made its way north, Larry and I sat together holding onto each other’s hands and staring blankly out the window. We were too choked up to speak, so John busied himself talking with the other passengers.
There were twelve miles of low rolling hills between San Luis Obispo and the campground at Morro Bay. In that short distance I learned that the difference between the maneuverability of my bike with and without fifty pounds of gear closely resembled the difference in the handling of a Mack truck and a Porsche. The first time I turned my handlebars to miss a rock in the road my bike continued to move straight ahead, and my front tire collided with the stone. The impact nearly jarred my teeth loose.
“All right,” I muttered to myself after I regained my balance, “next time you’ll try a sharper turn.” And the next time I spotted a rock in front of me I gave my handlebars a hard shove. Unfortunately that sent my bike sliding sideways and me bouncing across the pavement. But after a bit more experimentation I found that if I leaned my whole body in the direction I wanted my bike to go and turned the handlebars farther than I would without the extra weight, but not too far, I wobbled less and missed most of the rocks and sticks on the road.
When we reached the campground at Morro Bay, an hour and a half after we left San Luis, the rangers at the gate met us with some good news. Under the California Bike and Hike program, anyone who arrived at a state campground on foot or on a bike paid only fifty cents to camp, instead of the regular fourdollar fee. The rangers assigned us a huge secluded campsite full of pine trees.
John was ecstatic. “This is perfect!” he exclaimed after we set up camp. “Pine trees and fresh air everywhere, and we’ve still got time before it’s dark to bike around the bay and pick up some fish for dinner. Yeah, this is the life! You guys are gonna have a great time these next two years.”
Maybe, I thought. But I was still too nervous to relax and enjoy our surroundings. And when I crawled into our tent after dinner I couldn’t sleep. The ground felt hard, and my thin sleeping mat hardly provided any padding. I kept thinking about the next day. It would be our first full day of bicycling, and Larry and I planned to pedal all the way to the Plaskett Creek campground, over sixty miles north of Morro Bay along the coast. During the final twenty of those sixty miles, we’d be tackling the treacherous grades of the southern Big Sur coastline. Sixty miles over lots of mountains—what a way to start out.
The three of us got up early the next morning and scrambled some eggs and brewed a pot of tea for breakfast. By eight o’clock, we were on the road heading north along Highway 1. A few miles from the campground, the bottom of my handlebar bag started to scrape against the top of my front tire—our cookstove and cookset were too heavy for the bag’s supporting bracket. I stopped and reorganized my gear, shifting the stove and cookset to one of my rear panniers and repacking my front bag with lightweight clothing. In the next month I would make at least a dozen more such reorganizations before I’d learn how to balance the weight of my gear and how to position it for quick access to the items I used most often.
The morning of May 15 was clear, crisp, and sunny, perfect for bicycling, and John rode along with Larry and me for over an hour before he headed back to San Luis to catch the train home.
Larry and I stood at the edge of the road and watched John move back down along the coast, back to his home, family, and friends. After he disappeared around the last bend in the road we closed our arms around each other and held on tight.
“It’s just you and me now,” Larry whispered. “This is it.”
At long last, we were alone together starting out on our adventure. Almost immediately our homesickness and apprehension dissolved, and an anxious excitement bloomed in their place. The sun beat down out of the heavens; the Pacific sparkled; the air smelled fresh and clean; the surf crashed, birds sang, cows mooed, and the garden snakes, lizards, and squirrels scampered beside us alongside the road. No phones rang; no typewriters tapped; no clients screamed. For the next two years, there would be no rent or utility payments to make at the first of each month, no more forms and government regulations, no more eight-to-five behind a desk in a room filled with stagnant cigarette smoke. Trees, streams, and wildlife surrounded us now, and we were free to wander wherever we pleased. The freedom felt great, and Larry started to sing.
The two of us sang all the way to San Simeon, some thirty miles north of Morro Bay, where we stopped to eat lunch—and then all hell broke loose. San Simeon at lunchtime turned out to be where and when the merciless coastal headwinds began, and after we finished our meal we cycled straight into them for thirteen miles over a relatively flat terrain. Larry pedaled in front to block the wind. I stayed behind him, my head down, my eyes glued to his rear fender. We crept along in our lowest gear.
It took us two hours to conquer those thirteen miles. While we struggled against the wind, the sun fried its way through our sunscreen and sizzled our faces and lips. Every twenty minutes, when my knees, feet, seat, neck, shoulders, and back screamed for me to stop, I would pull off the road and lie flat on my back on the dirt shoulder. I’d dip my bandana headband into my water bottle and spread it over my scorched face, then for five or ten minutes try to block out the pain that was needling my muscles before I gathered myself up again and pounded my pedals for another twenty minutes. At the end of two hours we were at the cliffs.
When I first spotted them up ahead—the string of mountains that plunged into the ocean—I wondered how, when we were barely negotiating flat ground, we’d ever be able to climb them in the wind. I found out soon enough.
The mountain ridges ran east to west creating inlets or bays between each other. As we approached the first mountain, the road curved inland around a deep, wide bay, then climbed up the side of the mountain while heading back out toward the ocean and the end of the ridge. The mountain protected us from the northerly wind while we pumped up the steep grade, and we found that the climbing was actually easier than pedaling on flat ground against the headwinds. It felt wonderful to escape the howling wind; wonderful all the way up to where the mountain dropped off into the ocean and the road curved around the ridge’s sheer, rocky face as it turned back into the next bay. Logic told us that when we rounded the curve and were no longer shielded by the mountain, the gales would be there to greet us.
Just before we hit the curve I went into a crouch and took an iron grip on my handlebars. The wind struck me the moment I swung far enough around the side of the mountain to glimpse the endless series of ridges and bays that stretched along the coast ahead of us. And when it struck me, it swept me and my bike into the air and heaved us off the road and into the face of the cliff. The right side of my sunburnt body bounced across the gravel and rocks, and the gales pelted my face with sand and dirt; then all seventy pounds of my bike and gear came crashing down on top of my legs.
Fighting the explosions of air currents, I struggled to my feet, dragged my bike upright, and climbed back on. This time the wind blasted me into the opposite lane. I yanked my handlebars back to the right, but the bike’s tires continued to skitter toward the dirt shoulder on