I made it to San Francisco!

I arrived on Sunday, 2012-05-27, which turns out to have been the 75th anniversary of the completion of the Golden Gate Bridge. They were closing the bridge to all traffic for a fireworks display in the evening, and I managed to get onto the bridge about 20 minutes before they weren't allowing pedestrian or bike traffic any more. Lucky! Before I hit the bridge, I stopped by a bike co-op to see what was happening and hopefully get some directions,

There, I met Nicolas, who was biking in that direction anyway, and then I noticed a (clearly German-made) touring bike which was being ridden by Annette, who is a post-doc in bio at Berkeley. So, we all headed over the bridge together.

Annette showed me the rest of the way to Berkeley, where I've spent a couple of days hanging out with Carly (of Edmonton post-doc fame) and relaxing. Once again, I have clean clothes to wear. I spent 9 days on the bike straight! I had thought it was much less.

Getting to the bay area was a lot of fun. After Arcata, I went through another park full of big redwoods. It felt like being underwater, and the fallen giant trees reminded me of whale falls. I've always wanted to do an installation piece involving putting a whale skeleton somewhere far inland for people to discover, and this might just be the place for it.

After a while I headed over to CA 1 which follows the coast for about 300 km north of San Francisco. The days were pretty long and the hills never really disappeared, with the road either dropping down from the coastal cliffs to each stream bed or climbing high to get around some headwall or other. The views were spectacular, as was the roaring 40 km/h tailwind that I had for a day and a half.

The traffic was quite reasonable and I the road was fine for the trip. I took a short-cut through a camp ground at one point on which there was the smallest, most avoidable sand dune possible. I have always wanted a picture of myself epically pushing a bike through the sand, so I found a place where it looked dramatic and did just that, completely gratuitously:

I'm having a nice time here in Berkeley, and hope to get over to see San Francisco a bit more tomorrow. Sadly, I'm not going to be able to make it down to LA to see Meaghan on this trip, but I have another chance coming up with a conference (or in Europe!) so the time will come. On Thursday, I fly up to Vancouver to visit and bike the island before dealing with the French consulate.