observations

Arose this morn­ing at Chez Grrrl­dogs in Galt to a beau­ti­ful morn­ing, at least out­side. Inside my head was a dif­fer­ent story, I was a bit blue and home­sick. This usu­ally hap­pens to me on a trip, about day 5 or 6; I wake up in the morn­ing, and won­der why the heck I didn’t just stay home in my nice comfy rut! But cof­fee helped, and the first 200 miles of the day were spec­tac­u­lar scenery and won­der­ful roads. Joined CA-49 at San Andreas and rode it, and a few of it’s cousins all the way into Fresno. This part of Cal­i­for­nia is nice! You can keep LA, but the Sierra Nevada rocks. Here are some exam­ples of the roads and the scenery:

After hit­ting Fresno, it was a cou­ple of bor­ing hours to Bak­ers­field (today’s trivia: obvi­ously there is a Buck Owens Boule­vard in Bak­ers­field, but did you also know that there is a Merle Hag­gard Drive?). At Bak­ers field, I hung a left into the Tehachapi maoun­tains, and ended up in, oddly enough, Tehachapi. Cool old rail­road town, a bit down on its luck, and windy! The entire east­ern hori­zon is wind tur­bines, and there here for a rea­son!
(yeah, it’s a crummy pic­ture and hard to see. i was tired…)

walk­a­bout day 4. today was vis­it­ing day. lunch with an old high school friend, tea with an author/teacher friend in oak­land, cof­fee with another old high school friend, and then din­ner with motor­cy­cle friends in Galt. not much rid­ing, only about 185 miles, but a busy day non­the­less.
spent some time check­ing out road con­di­tions in the Sierra Nevada, doesn’t look pur­dent to try to make it to Mono Lake tomor­row. So i’ll head south, skirt­ing the foothills on the Sier­ras, prob­a­bly end­ing some­where around bak­ers­field of so, giv­ing me all sort of options for thurs­day, depend­ing on whether of not i can con­nect with my friends in Escondido.