Day Twenty-nine
Atascadero to Lompoc, 79 miles
It’s harvest season here. So weekend hotel rates are cranked. A room at Hotel Siri Downtown Paso Robles that I can get tonight (a Sunday) is quoted for $120, but next Saturday it will cost $453. I was looking for a room last night (a Saturday night) in the area, and “weekend rate crank” was in full effect. The best I could do was $300. So I resolved to get the most of it by eating two breakfasts this morning and packing a lunch from the hotel breakfast buffet as well. I had to spread my breakfasts out to stuff the most food in, so I hit the road pretty late, at about 10:30 AM.
Everything I said about the bad roads yesterday is all history now.
Today’s roads, south of Paso Robles, are in much better shape. I rode all day in designated bike lanes or on roads signed to “Share the Road”, 79 miles, into Lompoc, on the edge of Vandenberg Space Force Base.
My route included a long downhill coast into San Luis Obispo, yet another town to come back to and visit more patiently. A college town—home to Cal Poly and Cuesta College. Just outside of San Luis Obispo, the countryside is all about wine and vineyards. It felt different than Napa, with rolling hills and dozens of smaller vineyards and producers. It truly feels more like family than corporate operations.
With another quick descent, I entered the Santa Maria Valley, which, like the Salinas-Watsonville area I rode through a few days ago, is all about strawberries. California grows about 90% of the country’s strawberries. Most of them are grown in the Salinas-Watsonville, Oxnard, and Santa Maria areas, thanks to the climate, soils, available water and available labor. Santa Maria is now the biggest strawberry producing area. As I was looking this up, I learned that Cal Poly is the leading strawberry research institution, in the same way that UC Davis, up near Napa, is the leading winemaking research institution.
I’ll mention again how good the roads were today, which allowed me to start late and still get 79 miles under my wheels, though it was basically dark when I rolled into Lompoc.
Two things of note today
I finally rejoined the official West Coast Bicycle Route and Highway 1 today, after my 200 mile-ish detour around the Big Sur landslide.
I am actually very grateful for the slide, because Big Sur—while beautiful—is a known quality. These three days of detour through the Salinas Valley have unexpectedly piqued my interest.
Experiencing these areas by bike has opened me up to a part of California I knew nothing about. I have a lot of questions and only a few answers, so I will probably come back this way too. But not by bike!
Rocket launch
I have been wondering if I would luck into seeing a launch as I rolled by Vandenberg Space Force Base. And at 7:04 this evening, I was in exactly the right place to watch a Falcon 9 rocket race skyward with a payload of Starlink satellites. Had I been on time today, I would have been off the road by 7:00 and would have missed seeing the launch.
The rocket’s fiery glow created a corona in the clouds it was flying through.
Tomorrow I follow Highway 1 down another descent to the coast proper, then ride along the beaches for at least a day and a half, all the way through Santa Barbara, Ventura, Malibu and Santa Monica, where I started last year’s ride from coast to coast. I now have fewer than 300 miles to reach the Mexican border. I want to both jam it hard and finish the ride, and hold back a little and savor it. I am actually a bit ahead of my planned distance, and I am feeling strong, so I am not sweating a deadline. Great road ahead and plenty of time to cover it.
