Flea The Race

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So lastnight I was chatting with a Canadian couple at the campsite who are on a similar adventure to me but they are doing it in reverse, starting in San Diego and heading north, against all the advice about prevailing wind blowing from south to north.  They camped up at Big Sur last night and said it was an easy ride to there and it wasn’t very far so I decided on a light days cycling and therefore didn’t get going until a little later this morning and headed into Monterey to look around and get food before I made my way there.  It took me nearly an hour to get into town as I kept trying to skirt around this nasty hill in my way and in the end after all my messing I had to climb the damn thing anyway much to my displeasure in the midday heat!

As compensation for climbing the hill and because I was off the hook in terms of cycling, I decided to plonk my ass by a table in Denny’s Restaurant and have the waiter conveyer food to my table for as long as I was able to keep eating, I got stuck half way through my sticky toffee ice cream and had to push it as far way from my face as my arms would allow, I figured I’d be holding back the vomit for the next hour on the bike if I had eaten any more!

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When I got to the first campsite before Big Sur there was a full sign at the entrance, this usually means it’s full for everybody but hiker bikers, still it was down hill to find out if there was room and if there wasn’t room I’d have to climb up the hill again so I said no, I’d mosey on another bit to the next campsite 5km away, on the way I found a nice little forest patch with trails and flat secluded spaces inside so I decided to throw down my bike and stay there for the night.  I figure this might be the last bit of wild camping I do on the trip as the population density steadily rises over the next few days coming into and out of Los Angeles, I was also happy to be on my own for the evening so this was perfect.  There was plenty of daylight left by the time I arrived so I walked along the trails for a while down to a river, considered getting the fishing rod only the water looked to shallow to contain any edible fishies.

I found two black bags stashed in a hollow in the base of a giant redwood near where I set up my tent for the night, there was tents, cycling clothes and the like in the bag along with a copy of the new testament which I wasn’t so pleased to see, I was thinking I hope I don’t have to meet this guy in the middle of the night, I considered prepending a message to the new testament but thought better of it and left everything back as I found it.  Later on, probably at about 11pm there was this weird “sushing” sound outside my tent, it really sounded human, it happened a few times and freaked me out enough to get out of my tent with my head torch to see what the fuck it was, looking around I could see nothing then I spotted a bird staring at me twenty feet away, blinded by the spot of my headlight, that had to be it, so I got back inside my tent and the noise went on some more but it was moving all over the place, one minute close by the next it was away in a different direction, had to be the bird I figured, freaky fuck!

Predator Tent