San Diego - American Goal Line

Our last day of riding into an American Campground was a beautiful one.  We started out in an urban scene with some wild, but brief, hills to get onto the bike path.  The roads took us past the most beautiful beaches I've seen in the US yet - in that I saw my first American bikini clad beach babes.  Finally!  Wow. We stopped for lunch at the boardwalk and enjoyed the view.  :)
There were a few bridges to cross, but given that we had a couch with a fellow named Giri arranged for the evening, we resolved to stay by San Diego bay at the restaurants and shops for a drink.  Yum!

Erin with a 32 oz Margarita on the San Diego Boardwalk (we shared)

The area was nice, lots of little shops including a sock shop, a hot sauce shop, and a fudge store.  Tempting!  Could really use some socks.  :P
We left around 3:30 to trek towards our couch for the night and found ourselves going through downtown. It was great watching all the costumed downtowners while cycling through.  We had a few rolling hills and a surprising distance to go but within a couple hours we were very close.  Giri's house is on the side of a very steep valley so that presented some challenges in getting there.

Giri's house was amazing!  His two goats were very sweet, and the milk even sweeter.  We got our own rooms (wow!  Thanks!), made curry together, and met his two cute children and wife, Uma.  i noticed in the morning of the ride that my tire was going low, and discovered during repair that I had picked up a nail.  Oops!  Still, as our groups only flat, the Schwalbe tires 3 of us have, and the Armadillo tire Erin has all have proved quite excellent.

We learned that Bryan's parents had stopped by and were shortly in touch with them  to take a drive to Phoenix for a week off of our cycling adventure.  Wow!  What a treat!  Fun in the sun poolside?  Sounds good!  :)

Helicopters over our camp the previous evening at camp in San Elijo.

San Elijo State Beach

San Elijo State Beach

The ride to San Elijo took us mostly off the highway and onto our very own bike paths and military base because Highway 1 disappears into gravel and the fast moving freeway.    Before we officially entered Camp Pendleton we rode the Old Coast Highway which had been turned into a bike lane then all of a sudden a giant helicopter swoops down on us not 150 meters above our heads seemingly only there to check us all out. I guess we do look a bit like a dangerous slow-moving convoy from above.  Nonetheless we could cleary see the pilots and basically every detail on the aircraft. The whole time I thought they were going to jump out of the side and tackle us to the ground in some crazy military exercise.

After being waved through the base we ended up in Oceanside around lunch time.  We had heard about a wonderful all you can eat buffet called hometown buffet and were eager to find it and gorge ourselves. The directions we got said it was about three miles down the road with various turns and such. We didn't think that was so bad so we set out.  The three miles went by as we went up and down hills and still no buffet.  We confirmed that there was such a restaurant and got new directions from random people and kept going.  By the time we arrived, about 6 miles later, we were super hungry but the place did not disappoint. Everything you could ever want plus we made rootbeer floats.  I even made myself poutine! (which I have not had since Canada as no one ever has gravy, fries and cheese in the same place) We left three hours later feeling overly satisfied and not at all ready for the extra miles we added to our day.      

We arrived at the campground early enough to see the sunset and catch a glimpse of the surfers catching the last waves of the evening.  

Campsite by the water

sunset