...because no matter how carefully I ramp up to the phrase, I can never get it to come out correctly as "handlebar bag". YOU try it. Handlebar bag handlebar bag handlebar bag handlebag bar.

Last Sunday we woke up and did the final rearranging of gear in Kairos's pool room as Tynan and Alvin were making their way through (thank you, Green Library!) Season 7 of Star Trek: The Next Generation in the lounge next door. It was pouring, and we stared out the window with sad puppy-dog eyes for a while before beating a retreat to Star Trek.

Around 1pm the skies cleared briefly, and we made a mad dash up Old La Honda. Luckily there was only spitzle and drizzle on our way up, but the ridge was windier than I'd ever seen. At one point, I was blown from the right shoulder all the way over to the double yellow lines and on a jolt over the embedded reflector things in the middle of the road. Later I discovered that the jolt had dislodged a bungee cord holding my handlebar bag, and the scary mean hook had been dancing around my front spokes for two miles — kind of terrifying if you think about what could have happened. Namely, my front wheel freezing and me going splat over the top of it at 20 mph.

We'd planned to make it south on Skyline to Highway 9, which takes you down to the coast, but at 3:30 it suddenly started raining pretty hard. So we literally pulled off at the next turn (luckily, an open space preserve trail) and scrambled to set up the tent on the most tilty-ass camping space imaginable. And stayed inside for the next 16 hours, until the skies cleared around 9:30 the next morning. I almost neglected to tell you that we had no food. Well, we had two mini cans of tuna, six slices of whole wheat bread, peanut butter, jelly, and the added bonus of the well-traveled strawberry Nutri-Grain bar that I'd stuck in my little under-saddle bag LAST JULY. I'd packed faster than Alex that morning, thus getting a head start (and, therefore, lion's share BY FAR) on the leftover pasta I'd heated for the two of us around noon. One tuna sandwich and one PB&J did me okay for the rest of the night, but Alex is yet whining about how hungry he was that night. Oops.

Day 2: fine, a couple of hours of beautiful trafficless hairpins down to Boulder Creek (yahoo!), and then a bit busier as the day wore on and as we got closer to the coast. Not too much rain, just some constant drizzle building up to steady drops around mile 55, and we camped about 15 miles south of Santa Cruz at the beautiful and deserted Manresa State Beach Uplands.

Manresa also featured the friendliest camp hosts ever, as opposed to the creepiest camp hosts ever somewhere north of Crescent City. It's an exceedingly well-planned out campground, with a handful of campsites nestled in small, bushy, sheltery trees around each water pump. You're never more than a minute's walk away from the main path back to bathrooms and hot showers, Rain was prety steady by the time we'd gotten the tent up, so we cooked up some augmented beef stew (a foil packet of preprepared stew, with our own extra vegetables, tomato bits, rice, and jack cheese... YUM) and feasted under the awning overhanging the bathroom/coin-op-hot-shower complex.

Day 3: steady rain as we got started. Heavier rain as we proceeded through the lush farmland of Watsonville, from whence many Stanford co-ops get produce. Yum. Heaviest rain began around noon, pelting us painfully in the face as we prepared to join Hwy 1. At Marina, 5 miles north of Monterey, we called it quits for the day. Between the late start from the rain, the shortened days from the rain, and the future shortened days from predicted future rain, we weren't even going to make it to meet the northern end of the Amtrak route. So our sojourners finish by biking into the Monterey Airport and renting a car to get down to Irvine. (A good decision, I think, especially since learning that Day 4's route had been washed out by mudslides caused by one of the top dozen rainiest days in the last fifty years. Fifty years!)

Except, in the words of the Governator, I'll be back. Monterey to Mexico, just you watch.