61.57 miles in 5:48...Friday, November 22....Fifty years ago today, when JFK was killed, I was in my third grade classroom at St. Vincent De Paul School, in Wheeling, WV. Mrs. Wherry was the teacher, the first lay teacher I ever had, and I liked her after having nuns in the first and second grade. She told us what had happened, and we prayed as a class. I recall getting sent home from school early and I watched TV.
Today I am 50 years older, but I feel pretty good. The day started out with overcast skies, made cooler by a headwind. Everything I enjoyed with yesterday's tailwind, was just the opposite today. The temps were the same, between 55-65 degrees, but I felt a lot cooler today than yesterday. As I rode through Morro Bay, I noticed that the area where we camped, which we thought was the bay, was really only the opening of the bay to the ocean, by Morro Rock. The actual bay was pretty big, and Pam and I never really went anywhere where we could see it. On the south end of town , I went through Morro Bay State Park, and then around a pretty big marsh area. The ACA map took me off of Rt. 1, and the marsh area was soon followed by a little climb through a mountainous area. This is where I felt my legs and the fatigue from yesterday's ride. The wind was smacking me right in the face as I climbed the rollers, and that's no fun even on fresh legs. I came out of the hilly area into more farm area, and saw the broccoli, peas, cauliflower, celery and strawberries that grow in this area.
Pretty quickly, the fields ended and I was entering San Luis Obispo, known as SLO around here. I still wasn't back on Rt 1, as I rode through some residential streets, then a busy downtown area, followed by a more industrial area. The road I then followed paralleled Rt. 1 and US101, which combined for the first time. I had an incident occur on this road that has been very, very rare on this trip. As I was riding along on a long straightaway with no traffic and very little shoulder, a car came flying up behind me, and a woman, probably in her thirties, began screaming at me. She gave me a mini lecture about riding in the road could get me killed...blah blah blah. I apologized and then asked her in a louder voice if she was having a bad day( in the land of 'have a nice day'). She then gave me that famous two word farewell, as she sped off, and turned into her trailer court a few hundred yards up the road. I tried to remember the last time I had an incident with a driver of any kind, and it's been so long, I can't even remember it.
All was soon forgotten as I entered the Pismo Beach area. I had heard that Pismo Beach was a nice area, and it exceeded expectations. The shoreline in town is all cliffs, with big rocks in the water, and just very scenic. It has a nice pier and beachfront area on the south end of the cliffs, and then the Pismo State Beach is big and sandy, and it looked like it could be a very busy place in the summer. Somewhere in San Luis Obispo, the overcast conditions changed to sunshine, and the wind slowed down, and those conditions held up in Pismo, making it look even more beautiful. I stopped at a Subway and had lunch, and had a conversation with a 20-30 ish girl who was very interested in my trip. She said her husband would love to do what I'm doing, and she took the blog address. (A useless fact about Pismo Beach: on the old TV show Dragnet, Sargent Joe Friday retired to Pismo Beach, where he regained his health, and eventually went back to the LAPD, where the show had a second run on TV.)
Somewhere south of Pismo is where I picked up Rt. 1, which had once again separated from US 101, and ran through some unbelievably productive farm land. I could have picked up enough broccoli, cauliflower and celery along the road, that had fallen out of trucks, to feed us for a week. I came to the Hispanic farm town of Guadalupe, where more things were written in Spanish than English.
I then turned eastbound on Cali 166, to go to Santa Maria, where Pam had found a campground, after coming down 101. The trip on 166 was directly into the teeth of the baddest headwind I've had in a long time. There was nothing but agricultural fields as far as I could see, except to the east, where the Sierra Madre Mountains loomed on the far side of Santa Maria. 166 was a solid line of traffic in both directions for 6 miles, as the field workers were leaving on a Friday afternoon. I even saw payroll trucks in the fields so the labor could get paid and not inundate the banks and check cashing places.
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