Goodbye Giant Redwoods - Hello Palm Trees
Climbing to just over 300m on CA 1
Bullrushes
The front at Santa Barbara
A plover
Our day started along CA 1 to the top of a kind of pass through arid hills (1). That section went on for 30km or so before dropping to an intersection where CA 1 joined into US Highway 101, following the coast. 101 was like an old friend - the kind of old friend that if you see them in the supermarket, you duck down an aisle and hope they haven't seen you 😉.
It was about 70km along these two highways before we came to any kind of shop or cafe. Soon after that we were on a cycleway called the Obern Trail for quite a way. Not sure if it was still the Obern but we followed cycle paths along the front at Santa Barbara. At one point we were on a concrete path along the top of the beach, with sand to either side of us. There were a lot of dozy people milling around on this section so care was needed so as not to flatten someone 😉.
Since Santa Barbara we have had suburbs and either sections of road or cycle path shadowing 101. There have been a lot of other bikes around of all shapes and sizes since morning coffee. At one point we passed a couple of blokes on carbon road bikes. One of them seemed to take exception to being passed by two old farts on a tandem because when we slowed for a twiddly bit he had left his mate behind so he could re-pass us. I'm not sure what point that made though, because as soon as we had built back up to cruising speed we sailed past him again. We didn't see either of them after that - the poor guy was passed by two old farts on a tandem twice in one day - but it was of his own making 😉.
142km with 950m of ascent had brought us to Pierpont Bay. We are onto the last of the five GPX tracks provided for the Pacific Coast route by Adventure Cycling.
1. I say arid - the AirBnB host at Reyes Station said the hills go brown every summer but as soon as the rain comes in the autumn it all turns green again - he showed me some pictures.
A cautionary tale about Booking.com:
Way back when we were staying at Florence I booked a free cancellation motel and then realised I had made a mistake with distances and cancelled it immediately. When I was making the payment I received a 'something went wrong' message - I have seen this plenty of times before so didn't think much of it. I checked that the room hadn't been booked and re-ran the payment - this time it all worked. Then I realised my mistake and cancelled it. When I looked at by card statement I saw that the 'something went wrong' payment had been processed - I had two charges of £165 and one refund for the cancellation. I took this up with Booking.com customer services and they asked me to send a screen grab of the credit card statement (which you can't do because the banking app security doesn't allow screen grabs - I had to take a picture of my phone screen with Steve's phone). I did all that and provided all of the information they asked for, which took quite a while, and after all that Booking.com stuck two fingers up and said i wouldn't get my money back. I festered for a couple of days and then re-initiated the complaint with the heading 'Booking.com stole my money'. This time they rescinded and this morning £165 came back to my account 🙂. There is always the option of a claim through the credit card but Booking.com doesn't really give you much of a paper trail to support your claim with the bank - I'm not sure it would work.
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