What Was That?
Sort of a pffft nondescript 25 miles today, under mostly overcast skies. Which is fitting, I suppose, because I've ended up at a nondescript campground. The KOA in Eureka is nothing at all like the fine and wooded KOA in Crescent City: a storm hosting 107 mile-per-hour winds blew through in December of 2005, and took down 105 trees. The place looks like a parking lot now, well-populated with newly-planted saplings. It's sad, really...it will never be what it was.
I doubt that the trees, had they not already been weakened by pine beetles and managed to stay upright in the storm, would've improved the place terribly much...the sites are crowded together, and while one site next to me is empty, the other is occupied by a family of British extraction who erected a tent fit for dirigible building, a vast three-lobed affair that has a garage, an upper story, and a pool out back. It'll be a Benadryl and earplug night, I think.
But there's laundry, and WiFi, and a mostly flat place for the tent, so it'll do. I'd really like to make it to Weott tomorrow, and get in some real redwoods camping, but that's 57 miles with climbs, well out of my range. So I'll be pedaling forty miles to Stafford, with a stopover at the post office in Loleta to pick up a replacement part for my ultralight cot (that part being the fabric that makes the cot a cot).
It's strange to be able to see the end of the road. Five weeks, maybe six, and I'll be in Santa Barbara. I can barely imagine it. I've grown accustomed to the dichotomies of my life on the road: toting high technology, yet sleeping in forests; homeless, yet always sheltered. There are many things about this journey that I'll miss. Some, of course, I won't miss at all, but it's the positive experiences that will, sooner or later, compel me to take to the road again.
There are certainly things I'd do differently. Touring with technology is its own game with its own rewards, but it does leave me feeling tethered to stuff, the expensive toys that I feel I must guard or have on my person at all times. When I do this again, it will either be sans tech or (more likely) with better, smaller, lighter tech that is less obtrusive and more easily looked after. And by God, I'll be in better shape before I go, next time. That's certainly a lesson that only needs to be taught once.
Still: I won't focus too much on this road's end, not yet. There are still many miles to travel, many hills to climb. It's certainly been a different journey than I anticipated, at least in the literal sense of rubber on the asphalt and rotations of the pedals. The intangible journey, though...that's shaping up much as I thought it might: difficult, with interior climbs and descents that dwarf those of the external route. Some of those interior challenges have been directly related to the physical effort of moving from place to place, but most have not.
That's what I signed up for. I don't regret a single moment.
