Big Sur Valley

Friday October 18, 2013 - Monday October 21, 2013.

Big Sur is not as bad as it sounds.  It is named after the river, not the mountains. That being said, our ride through the park was a lot of going up above the foggy clouds, back down through the clouds, and then below the clouds as well.  The fog seemed to roll in around 9 am, and stick around 3 or 5 hours.  The area has jade!  On the beaches.  Beautiful green rocks that we collected from the beach and road ways.  Just what we need on our bikes in the hills: rocks.  

There are a few very small grocery stores in the big Sur strip.  And they all charge 2-3 times the normal retail rate for food.  Bastards.  There are tons of redwoods here, as in most moist places along the california coast.  The beaches are beautiful.  We stayed first at the Pheiffer state park, then at the Kirk Creek national park.  We had a rest day here after a couple of the big hills were done.  No fresh water!  We had to fill our dromedary from a creek and then run it through our hand-pump ceramic filter into the other 10 liter dromedary.  Lots of work, but there's nothing that replaces fresh, clean drinking water.  

We met a couple friends we made on our trip earlier (Jim and Morene who had recommended Erin change her front crank - her knees are a lot better now) and shared a meal with them (we ran out of propane, and they let us use their stove so we fed them) and our water with them at Kirk Creek.  They ran out of food at Kirk Creek and only ate a box  of rice-a-roni for dinner.  We showed them the 2 front panniers me and Erin carry full of food.  Of course, since they had run out, carrying lots of food suddenly seemed like a fabulous idea.  But we generally run a LOT heavier than others that are touring due to our preparedness.  

We were actually a bit tight on food too but found a big bag of black bean flakes left by previous cycle tourists in the coon-proof box.  Even had a note saying they didn't enjoy the taste.  I'm thinking they didn't have the recipe right (often people use too much water) or didn't have our spices.  Because those flakes were fabulous on pasta.  YUM!  But ya, we basically ate all our food.  Uh oh.  Bryan and Maggie made friends where they took their rest day at Pheiffer and were fed two dinners there.  They're still doing great for food.  It was nice to be light for the hills though.  Yow.

Fog. not a lake that the old tourist thought it was..