sm to slo bike tour, day 5

Day 5: Left Ragged Point 9:30, arrived SLO 3:45

Nice, leisurely ride until Harmony, after which we encountered a lot of wind and a lot of hot sun, and a lot of hills.

We had a fair amount of inland riding where we didn't see any coast or any fog. While it was a nice break from the fog of the previous days, I'd gotten unused to riding in warm weather, not to mention headwinds. But I had plenty of energy and got to do a lot of riding in the drops. We saw elephant seals, wild (?) turkeys, and hawks. In Cayucos, we stopped at Ruddel's Smokehouse, an absolutely spectacular find that I was drawn to by mysterious forces. Seriously, it was off the main drag, and I was guided to it. I had a smoked salmon sandwich -- made on incredibly great bread, with lettuce, apple, curry powder, and wonderfully smokey salmon. They also have incredible ahi jerkey, and the smoked fish tacos aren't bad either. We sat on the steps to the beach and enjoyed our lunch. On the way out of town we stopped at a candy shop and i picked up some taffy and caramels, which i chewed during the rest of the day's ride.

After Cayucos, the weather became very hot -- it felt at least 90, possibly hotter. I passed some folks (on the uphill, yay me!) who later turned out to be touring from SF to SLO -- with a van! lucky them.

The super8 in SLO is serviceable and close enough to good restaurants that it didn't matter that their breakfast is ridiculously bad. Woodstock's pizza was unremarkable at best, though they had no corkage fee.

In all, the most surprising thing about the tour was how easy it was. There wasn't a single morning where I didn't feel like riding, particularly after it was over -- I got anxious on the days we didn't have a planned ride, and tried to fit rides into our schedule. Once home, that was a different story, I got a bit lazy and skipped some rides; but on the tour, I only wanted more and more.

I would have liked to do a little more exploring in the cities we visited, but I also enjoyed the fact that our tour was not overplanned -- we had to talk to locals to find good places to eat lunch. we could have covered a lot more miles per day if some of us were faster, but the leisurely pace was good for our longevity, i think. i felt that i could easily have maintained that pace indefinitely.

we had no mechanical issues of any sort, though i did get a couple of saddle sores after day 1, and promptly adjusted my seating such that i was not bothered by them the rest of the trip.

the trip was incredibly fun, and i won't hesitate to plan another -- with the possible caveat that part of the fun came from being on the central coast that i enjoy so much.

once we were in SLO, I visited with my old friend and mentor, visited some favorite beaches, ate at sylvester's, the cracked crab (didn't enjoy it as much as i used to, my dining standards have been raised quite a lot since 2007), farmer's market, and mcclintock's.

oh, a special "no thanks to you" goes to enterprise rent-a-car, who did every possible thing wrong at every possible step of the way. that was the only part of the entire trip that i would classify as "went poorly". enterprise has lost me as a customer, but i fear hops is more forgiving. here is the list of their offenses: despite hops checking thrice on the reservation, our minivan was not at the airport as it was supposed to be (though we arrived an hour early, to be fair to enterprise). when hops picked it up at their satellite location, it was covered in dog hair. we took it back to have it cleaned, and the rep said "oh, that van was used by a seeing-eye dog". oh really? was the dog supposed to vacuum it before returning it? instead of cleaning that van, they gave us a new one, which turned out to have non-functional A/C, which wasn't a problem until our drive home through 100F weather. we survived it all right but didn't get much of an apology, or a refund.

i'd rather not end the post on a sour note, so i'll point out that we're working on getting around to planning a short tour of sonoma in the coming months. also, on our trip to slo, we ran into several other tourists besides the SF group and ward and jackie -- of all the bike tourists we met, we were the ones going the shortest distance. someday, that won't be the case.