The ride started beautifully. We went through farm fields mostly and Bryan was clever enough to beg some strawberries from some harvesters along the way which went a long way to rejuvenating us. As you can guess from the ominous warning from yesterday's blog post, Erin was not feeling at her best energy wise and we were a bit slow going. Even so, we took an early lunch off the highway in a dead-end lane in the open sun while viewing the 700 year old oak trees the area is known for.
At that time we resolved to make the day a shorter one if possible and braced for the hill ahead. The thing about hills isn't that they are so much more work, though they are, nor that they are less satisfying to climb due to the slowly changing scenery, though that too; mostly, the thing about hills is that moving slowly really reduces your ability to keep cool. And as we started climbing out of the valley back towards the shore, we hit about 1pm and the sun came out from the clouds and our body temperatures soared. It was an exhausting climb, if short, and the trip down the hill on the other side was all the sweeter due to the incredible view that we were awarded with.
Arriving in Lompoc, we found a larger town with good services, a campground, and many amenities and stores. We went to the campground, leaving Maggie at the library working on her blog and couch requests and found a campground that only charged $5 a night! For the site, not by person! Rest day! The shower token machine was broken so we got free showers to boot. yes!
We also had a run in with the dollar store here and basically had to take a rest day to avoid hanging plastic bags of food off of the bike panniers. I had resolved to empty the sack of prickly pears I still had and then harvest more. I tried boiling them down but the seeds clung mercilessly to the flesh. Made a big pot of prickly pear seed corn meal that was pretty hard to eat. Found a prickly pear cactus on the other side of the river from the riverpark rv campground and harvested a dozen pears that we tried roasting in the fire to remove the spines. Marginally successful, mostly because you end up with a pretty smokey tasting fruit.
On the way out, we realized we were next door to a massive concentration of prickly pears! Doh! We could've experimented a ton more in our time. Oh well. The addition of a dollar store set of tongs sure improved the harvesting process.
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