Flea The Race

Day	30	Date	7th June 2015
Distance Total Distance	49.5km 1,797.9km	Weather	Sunny
Rolling Time Total Rolling	03:45:38 112:03:36	Terrain	Hilly
Climbing Total Climbing	545m 19,732m	Spend	Coffee food $10.00 Bar Food & Beer $38.00 Hostel $50.00 Coffee & Panini $9.00
Average Speed	13.2km/h	Sleeping	Hostel
Max Speed	54.7km/h	Difficulty	Easy

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Today is the day that everyone in the group is excited about, crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, our gateway into San Francisco.  The group this morning on the road has expanded by three so there are nine of us riding together into San Francisco, two of the group live in the city so they led us through a really cool route though Marin County, a super nice area with a filthy rich feel to it.  We went through lots of back streets via cool little neighbourhoods and the weather was perfect, it was definitely one of the nicer cycle segments of the trip so far, up there with Avenue of Giants.  It feels like city all the way into San Francisco from 30 odd kilometres out, much more civilisation than I have witnessed in over a month.  We stopped off at a supermarket for 30 minutes to get coffees and food which we ate outside the store in the sun before making the final break for the bridge and the city!

We hit the bridge for 1:30pm, got all the pictures, for some it was emotional as it was the endpoint of their trip, seeing the bridge was cool, like a reality symbol to signify we had made it as far as San Francisco.  I often remember looking at my bike back home in Ireland during the early days of planning this road trip wondering if it would ever get to cycle across the Golden Gate Bridge, back then the idea felt a little surreal but today I got to witness the outcome, the bike did in fact get to cross the bridge, nice!

Crossing the bridge is a busy affair, there are two sides to the bridge for pedestrians and cyclists, the centre lanes are all for cars, most of the people on the bridge are tourists either on foot or with bike rentals for the day.  Crossing the bridge took over nine minutes of continuous peddling, its almost 3km in length, from the bridge we rode into town and stopped at Rogue Nation, for some well earned beers and dinner, we piled the bikes up outside on the footpath and sat at tables outside in the sun, I ordered the Patty Melt and two beers later we were all poised to disband and disperse into our own individual paths again.

I checked into the hostel, locking my bicycle outside in the lane, unsure if they had storage for bicycles.  When I checked in the first thing they did was to get me to move the bike out of the lane and into storage, you can’t leave a bike unattended in the city for a minute, it’s worse than Dublin by all accounts.  Bike stored and checked in I was pretty damn happy that I could forget about my stuff for a while and go exploring about the city.  There are storage chests in the room all kitted out with power outlets, this hostel is definitely one of the better ones, they have thought of everything to make life easy.  The rooms were so warm that I was gagging for a shower once I was unpacked so got that out of the way before setting about roaming the city, over to Market Street and past the New Central Hotel where we used to live, I’m not sure why we stayed there before, it’s a real shithole, the area is dirty and run down with homeless people everywhere, it would feel unsafe had I not lived here before but I know it looks a lot worse than it really is.

I was planning to go for a few beers tonight but tiredness and laziness superseded my desire to hang out in a bar so I chilled out in the hostel for an hour or two in the evening before going to bed.  Tomorrow night will be beer night 🙂