Friday - Jim writes
You'd have to be here to believe it. All though Monterey is a scant 52 miles to the north, it feels like we are in a foreign country. Banana trees line the driveway and pampas grass covers the hillsides. Across the ravine a shack on stilts is perched next to a humming diesel powered generator, giving the place a feeling of remote Jamaica. And remote it is--not only must they generate their own electricity, there is no phone service. Nor does our cell phone work here. For today we are out of touch with the rest of the world.
We are however, still in California, in the Big Sur area. This tiny enclave with one restaurant and 10 cabins is known as Lucia. Named for the original homesteader's daughter, Lucia, who was named after the Santa Lucia Mountain Range, which towers over the coastline.
The restaurant, Lucia Lodge, was built in 1937 when highway 1 was finished after 14 years of construction. The lumber for the lodge was cut from redwoods here on the property.
We ate "dinner" there, our only choice, at 3:30 today. The waitress had waited for us and promptly put up the CLOSED sign. So there Jeanette and I where, alone in the small dinning room with windows overlooking the ocean, seated next to a fire in the rock fire place under the dark redwood hand hewed beams enjoying an intimate meal. We couldn't have felt any luckier.
We choose Lucia as a way to equal out the climbs and distance through the Big Sur. Although the mileage was short (27 miles) we climbed over 2200 feet. It was foggy with only an occasional glimpse of a bay or beach far below.
Knowing about the climbs through this area we had stopped this morning at the post office to lighten our load once again. This time we sent home bath towels, extra clothing, a fuel canister, and Jeanette's front panniers. Now we're really riding light.
With Jeanette's front panniers off she had a rattle. Investigating, we found that a bolt had worked loose from the front rack and was completely missing. The best I could come up with was a small piece of telephone wire I found along side the road to hold it together. Her back rack has already been temporarily repaired with two mini-hose clamps after the welds broke on the southern Oregon coast.
I'll conclude with the two dumbest questions of the day. This morning at breakfast another cyclist asked us if we cycled much, and this afternoon I overheard a tourist as he got out of his car ask if there was a place around here called "Big Sur".
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