Beaches and Santa Barbara

It is very nice to be down in Southern California at last. The
weather has been perfect for many days now although the sun keeps
disappearing earlier and earlier each and every day. We went over the
last of the big hills between Morro Bay and Gaviota including some
awesome high speed descents. We've mostly had nice tailwinds for the
last couple of weeks; it is true that on the coast the wind always
blows from the North unless there is bad weather near. We've not yet
seen one exception to the rule. We had an off day on Sunday at
Refugio Bay State Park; our hiker/biker camping area was beach front
under a row of palm trees, spectacular. We went swimming in the ocean
for the first time on the trip (there were two aborted attempts
further north) and found ourselves tossed like rag dolls in the very
powerful waves.

On Monday we cycled into the Santa Barbara area and headed through
University California at Santa Barbara. As we headed towards campus
we passed an apartment tower with the biggest bike rack I have seen in
North America (only bettered so far by Amsterdam) filled with
countless bikes. A little further along we started to notice that all
around us there were people on bikes and once we reached campus proper
it was like we had suddenly arrived in planet bike; virtually every
person was on a bike, there was probably only 1 out of 20 that was
walking rather than riding. The bike paths headed off in every
direction with big bicycle round abouts keeping the orderly chaos
flowing. It was really cool; I should have taken a video.

Santa Barbara is a very nice city. We cycled up to the old Spanish
Mission circa 1786 which remains an impressive building. Not far now
until Los Angeles and beyond that the Mexican border. The question of
just what we plan to do after San Diego remains. I am leaning towards
continuing on through the Baja and then ferry over to Mazatlan or
Puerto Vallarta although I think that we'll probably be jumping on a
bus or two along the way.

I hope everyone is avoiding the swine flu or more importantly the
swine flu hysteria.