Day Twelve

Mileage: 66.3 miles
Total: 672.6 miles

Today I became a fan of the metric system. Why? Well, because today I broke the 1000 km mark, and 1082 sounds even more impressive than 672.6. While riding today I can definitely say as hilly as the Big Sur marathon is, we runners are lucky thats the route because boy does it get hillier further south!

Before continuing and going into the details of today's ride, I want to debunk a few myths. I spoke a bit about one of these myths earlier, but let's revisit this now.

Myth 1: If you go from north to south it will all be downhill. Although this may seem like a reasonable assumption, it is definitively not true.

However, this is not the most shocking myth.

Myth 2: If you bike from north to south along the coast the predominant winds will come from the north, blowing you to the south. This has simply not been the case for this ride. Aside from the day out of Half Moon Bay, the wind has been more often than not coming head on. Today was no exception as we battled headwinds yet again. In fact I started singing a song about wind today to the tune of Tambourine Man. It went something like this "Hey mister wind machine man, blow a breeze for me. . ."

I digress. Today brought the worst weather and riding conditions of the whole trip. We had a couple hours of partly cloudy riding this morning, followed by six hours of rainy, hiily, headwindy fun. And you know what else? It was actually fun. The riding through Big Sur was simply amazing, complete with seeing a waterfall that spills onto the beach. After fifty hilly miles we pushed on along the flatter section for the rest of the ride to San Simeon, where we decided to dry off and warm up with a hotel room. We also enjoyed a warm meal (not prepared on a camp stove). mmmmm salt + brocolli!

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