Day 16: August 26th, 2008 – Conifer Cities to Metropolitan Muir


8 Miles East of Fairplay --> Davis, CA

The hound had shaken me enough to cause my sleep to be fairly light, so even before the first beam of daylight I was back on my bike paying my penance for the 8.2 mile mishap the night before. I had gone off track many times before on this trip but never without purpose or at lease the knowledge of doing so. The feeling of junk mileage was eating at me so badly that I made the 8.2 mile 4000 foot climb in a flash. When I arrived at my missed turn I realized why I hadn’t seen the turnoff, it was unmarked and looked far more like a backwoods driveway than an essential key to the route across the West. So after a night spent miles off track dangling over a demented dog, I had returned to my road less traveled. It was just as pleasant as I had imagined in my dreams the night before. The rolling terrain through towering pines was pleasant enough to make me loath my decent into the arid lowlands surrounding Sacramento, something I had looked forward to for many days. Wineries flanked my ride for many miles on the decent. I had hoped to buy a bottle to celebrate the end of my ride but I was still very weight conscience at this point, so I decided just to take care of any celebratory measures in San Francisco.
Before I could even so much as say goodbye to the mountains my tires were already greeting the pavement of Urbania. The perfect ratio of luxury vehicles and dueled out imports made one thing unmistakable, I was in California. Amongst this foreign city I was approaching something familiar, Folsom Prison. Made infamous by Johnny Cash’s song by the same name, Folsom was a place imagined by millions as the epitome of terrible prison life, so accordingly I was expecting a poor little prison town. Instead I found another California community with an over inflated sense of the worth of their real estate and most likely themselves. Folsom Prison is now surrounded with multimillion dollar homes and its lake is filled to the brim with water skiing with Yuppies. The Man in Black would be shamed!

Right as I was entering the part of the directions that included more than one turn every hundred miles, I ran in to Bill. He was just cycling to his wife’s elementary school to say hello and his path just so happened to correspond exactly with mine. So Bill showed me the town while guiding me through the dozens of turns that I would have had to navigate on my own. He was a very intelligent middle aged contractor who was also very interested in my journey. He repeated several times that it was a pleasure to take me though one of my last days of riding. Bill was not unaccustomed to the long distance tour, he and his friends did a 3 or 4 day tour once a year, but I got the feeling he wasn’t sleeping in bulldozer pales.

When he asked me how people had treated me along the way, I realized than my journey was nearly over and I hadn’t had one negative interaction with anyone except a laundry attendant in Westcliffe on my second day, and even with her I felt that she was a nice woman having a bad morning which I caught the raw end of. He was stunned by my good fortune but I explained to him that often while riding my transparency and vulnerability allowed people to let down their guards and be themselves with me. The simplicity of my goals were clear to everyone I ran into, like my very actions displayed honesty and worth. I was riding, that was it.


I rode with Bill for about 2 hours until he left me near West Sacramento. He gave me directions out of town and sent me out on my own again. I rode along the Great American Bike Trail to what the locals affectionately call, Old Sac. The western most part of Sacramento, Old Sac is the remnants of the original pioneer town of Sacramento. I took a ride over the golden bridge out of Old Sac and into West Sacramento where I stopped at the ole golden arches for a hamburger.




I parked my bike along the glass windows and walked inside, all the while enduring the stares of two young men about my age. I understood that I might have looked a little out of the ordinary but these guys were really cutting through me with the stares. I few minutes later we ran into each other at the soda fountains, they need only say two words to bring us much closer to understanding each other “ Western Express?”. It turns out these two young chaps where riding the same route as me, except they were going cross country and it had taken them most of the summer. They had left from Virginia Beach about 2 months prior. These two Boston College students moved at a relative snails pace. The day I had left from Pueblo they were half way through Utah and somehow I had managed to double their pace and catch them before the sea. They had stopped for the night in order to watch some of the DNC on television, one of them kept jabbering on about making it back to the hotel in time to watch Hillary Clinton speak. That couldn’t have been further from my mind.

They were nice guys and but you could tell that they were pretty fed up with eachother, and thus people in general. That was one of the great benefits of my ride, although I have no one to share the experience with (save those that read this blog of course), the interactions I had along the way were that much more intense. Think about it, if the whole day you have all these revolutionary ideas traipsing through your young exhausted mind and you don’t have anyone to spill them out upon, and then all of the sudden you have a short and seemingly meaningless conversation with a woman at a campsite, a man on a high mountain pass, or an old vagabond in a diner……you’re blow away, you’ll remember every word forever as if it were divine revelation. I’m not sure how to explain it but the best I can do is to say that most days I received all the love/human intimacy/social allowance (whatever you want to call it) I really needed out of a few very bizarre and brief interactions with total strangers.
These two did have some pretty good stories though. They had been on the road so long that they were inviting misfortune. Three days earlier on Carson Pass they were essentially attacked by Yogi Bear…. Turns out even if you don’t cook where you sleep you still smell just like the food you just ate. After finishing my two Big Macs, I bid those two jokers farewell and set off for the coast.

The terminus of the Great American Bike trail is in Davis. Davis, CA is a college town not at all unlike Athens, GA. I felt at home as I dined on Pita Pit and sat under the trees that lined the streets. Davis is also known as the biking capitol of the U.S. but apparently not as accommodating to vagabond bikers. It became apparent that I would have to be clever with my sleeping arrangements once again, so I picked a bridge out on the map a few miles out of town and decided to ride there when I felt tired. I strolled around town for a bit taking in the sights and sounds of college life while talking to friends and family back home. I had a particularly ridiculous conversation with miss Lauren Groblewski, whom is always good for a laugh or two.
Come to think of it I’d like to thank everyone who I talked to/ called / heard message from / whatever. You have no idea how much I enjoyed the ridiculous messages I received that reminded me of how little I had let anyone know what I was up to. I tried not to answer messages because I wanted to focus on the present but I did enjoy the games of telephone that were going on. ‘So and so told me you were biking to Colorado Springs, her sister told me that your riding you motorcycle to Canada, we heard your moving to San Francisco and your walking there.’ Or the messages of people that just sorta sounded afraid; “Hey man I’m not sure where you are or what you’re doing…… I’ve heard a lot of different stories… just hope your safe” or those few of you who knew exactly what I was up to and decided to boost my morale by telling me that your first week of classes were grueling.

Anyway, after finishing up a few victorious calls to folks that knew tomorrow would be my last day riding, I started out to the bridge I had picked out on the map. On my way out I passed an unending row of parallel fruit trees that divided a corn field in two. It was an irresistible sight to anyone on a bike, even in the dead of night. So as I rode between the trees I decided to forgo the bridge for the night and instead spend my evening as a child of the corn. I took a hard left between two rows of corn and never looked back. I was less than 70 miles from the coast.... tomorrow would be a good day!

Day: 124.79 mi
Total: 1643 mi
Elev. Climbed: 1600 ft
Elev. Difference: -3900 ft

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