After Arcata hippy town we hit the road early, the first 39 miles were boring, very long stretches of highway 101, a busy section with not much in the way of veiws so we just got it out of the way! But all was ok because our next section was the avenue of the giants. After a few long climbs we got to the turn off and got onto the avenue of the giants where we spent the rest of the day. The trees are just awesome, I have never seen trees so big. After riding down the redwood national park a few days before I thought the trees there were big, these are bigger. 1 of the trees mesured in at 379 feet high, just amazing.
The ride was great, some big climbs followed lots of long swooping decent which seem to last for ages going through the massive redwoods, it was 1 of the best rides we have had, it makes you feel so small!
After a nice ride through the red woods we got to our camp at Burlington, the campground was great, set in the woods. The hiker/biker campsite was cool, all the bikers are lumped into a couple of sections so its best to get there early for a good spot! We met up with all the other tourers we had been yoyoing all day and met some others which came in later. We made tea and swaped stories in the evening. We met 1 group Jen, Jim and Mike who were very fit tourers who were heading to San Fran, Mike was awesome, at a guess i´d say he was over 65, but he was weatherd! Mike had cycled over 90,000miles on his latest bike and he wasnt going lightweight! Awesome! We had even more cool stories from Gary who we had been riding with for 3 days. Gary had been all over the world and worked in yellowstone where he had been charged by a grizzly!
The next 2 days were the hardest yet, it was 2 days of climbing, and because we headed in land away from the coast the temperature shot up to around 35oC. The first day was long climbs, we ate all our food as the heat just drained us of energy, after what seemed like a lifetime of climbs we got to camp at Standish Hicky, shared the days riding with the others, battled the mossys and had a big burger from the grill across the road!
The next day was awesome, very steep 4 mile climb right from the camp ground, we had an early start to miss the heat and started to climb, feeling pretty good we flew up some steep switchbacks and got to the top quick. The descent was amazing, very fast through some tight turns, was great. After another climb and another awesome descent (the best 1 yet) we had a ten mile stretch of rolling coastal hills to camp, at this point we were both tired and had pretty much nothing left in the legs!
The last couple of days have been some really nice coastal riding, a bit cooler on the coast but lots of rolling roads with great descents and the steepest climb of the whole route. This climb was hard with tight hair pin-bends, we had a cheering croud of tourers at the top which was cool.
Its been a great few days, we have met a great bunch of people, We are now at a place called Manchester, a very quiet area right on the beach.
