We did our tour of Alcatraz last night, which was suitably jailish, although we would've preferred to have somewhat fewer than 200 touristas around. You don't quite get an authentic experience of a solitary confinement cell when you're locked in it with five other people.

On days that we don't have much planned, like yesterday, we spend most of our time just walking randomly about the city, which is helpful for me in terms of getting to know the place, and nice for the boys, who are eager to see the city, stagger out of as many of its pubs as possible, and engage in rousing rounds of Spot The Tranny.

Pub crawls are different experiences for me now, as the strongest kick I get from a drink is the quinine in tonic water, and, if I'm feeling especially daring, a wedge of lime. But I'm finding the dynamics of remaining sober in a bar to be so engaging that not drinking has become it's own reward. This, I think, is key to the successful continuation of same. I've discovered that I become more socially relaxed when others around me are drinking, which is exactly what I was pursuing when I was drinking in groups. Now, though, I don't wake up the next morning wondering just how much of an idiot I was the previous evening...I know exactly how much of an idiot I was. Which, so far, has been "not much of one," as I seem to function fine without being propped up by pints. I not saying that everyone who drinks in bars needs propping up; that's just how it worked for me, and I'm pleased to be able to wobble forth under my own unfermented power into the city evening.

Doug says I have the same glint in my eye that he and many of his other friends had when they decided to move here, which is a fine sign of my determination. I'm currently engaged in the initial stages of an interview process for full-time employment, which seems to be proceeding favorably, but if that doesn't work out, there are enough contracts and projects floating around that I'll still be able to move ahead with my plans. One way or the other, I'm going to live here, Bob will be a hep fat West Coast Cat, and all of my stuff will be in the same place as me. Except, perhaps, for my power tools...I'm not sure how much use I'll have for my Porter Cable reciprocating saw once I'm in an apartment again.

Today, we'll be flitting about the city with Doug in a Zipcar, and there will be more food! San Francisco has so much restaurant capacity that, if everyone in the city went to dinner at once, they'd all have a seat.

Finally: we've moved our departure from Monday morning to Tuesday morning, to avoid Labor Day traffic. It will be strange to be back on the road, but, I think, the journey will be fresh once more.

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Yesterday, Doug took the three of us (via bus, rather than Zipcar) 'round to Cliff House...not to eat, just to hike around a bit near the site of demolished public pool-type building from the 40s, and then out to Land's End point. In the photo, Doug is the one who is not us.

Little did Doug know what was in store for him later that evening, after we had eaten pasta-type things near Green Street. The original plan was to head over to the Mission district, but we ended up leaving the restaurant late, so we hung around a couple of local bars. The first was the sort of place that I couldn't stand even when I was drinking: loud, small, crowded, hot. So we moved on, along with Doug's friends Erin and Helen, to another place that was somewhat less less loud, small, crowded, and hot. Whereupon much cider, magararita, and Guinness ensued. By the time Doug began to realize that he was in the presence of two Brits who dwell in alcohol in much the same way that fish dwell in water, it was too late. Immediately after he confided to me that his plan was to wait them out, as last call was only half an hour away, Tom showed up with three Jaegermeister shots, one of which he smacked down between Doug's half-empty pint of Guinness and the full one next to it. Doug's resistance crumbled.

At some point in the evening, Tom left to hit the pisser, and returned draped around a couple of Irish strangers. As it turned out, the male portion of the couple was wearing a shirt emblazaoned with West Ham United's badge. This was an occasion, then, for an enthusiastic rendition of a song which was beyond my American comprehension. The pair tottered off elsewhere, and eventually the evening ground down as attrition sent Erin and Helen home and a gaggle of Berkeley girls showed up, apparently so that Doug could demonstrate his psychic abilities.

In the end, everyone made it back to where they were supposed to be, carefully stepping up the city's hills. Today, we'll be heading to a barbecue down by the Marina.

Only a couple of more days here, then.

But: I get to come back!

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For now, at least. That's our circus with Doug, Erin (left), and Liz (right), at the Rogue bar, purveyors of Dead Guy Ale and other unexpectedly strong concoctions. What you're looking at here is one of the more significant reasons for my relocation: an acceptance and a sense of community that's so very different from New York, where it's almost a rite of passage to penetrate the hidden social reaches of the city and find your niche. I never did, and while the fine people I've met here over the past week may or may not constitute a "niche," they were welcoming and fun to be around. I find it difficult to describe, really...but without being mawkish: this place feels like home to me. That's something I never thought I'd say about any city.

Tomorrow, we head south out of San Francisco along the Pacific side, then about 30 miles to wherever our first night's camp will be. I haven't plotted the route yet...it seems like something best left until morning.

Tonight, a bit of packing up, and then to bed.

My next entry will be from the road.

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We stayed at Half Moon Bay State Beach last night...we're still here, in fact, because our next ride is a short one, to a hostel at a lighthouse midway between here and Santa Cruz, so we're taking our time getting ready to leave.

We were going to stay at Pelican Point RV park last night. Despite the park's total lack of tents, they were going to stick to their "two person per site" rule, which meant one of us would have to pay in full for a separate site. We thought this was ridiculous, and said so. We decided to move on, which meant backtracking about 3.5 miles. While Tom was changing a flat out in front of the office, the manager showed up and demanded that we get off his property. Apparently his policies are not "ridiculous," they are his "policies." The sullen wench in the office had summoned him from elsewhere on the grounds, after having lied to us about his being on site when we first arrived, so that she wouldn't have to make the supreme effort of calling him to ask for an exception to the 2-person rule.

Just as well: the park here in Half Moon Bay is 100 yards from the ocean, with immaculate bathrooms and showers, and cost $3. We were going to stay at the RV Park to avoid the odd people we thought we'd find at a park so close to the city, but didn't allow for the fact that Half Moon Bay looks to be a well-off sort of place that Doesn't Tolerate That Sort Of Person. Still, it tainted our day to encounter such a hostile bastard, especially when his RV Park is listed on the Adventure Cycling map. I'll be contacting AC to recommend that Pelican Point RV Park be removed from the map, since the owner clearly neither needs nor wants the business of touring cyclists. The day improved when I called Josh, a fellow I'd met at the Eureka KOA a few weeks back who offered me a place to stay in Santa Cruz. Sometimes making such calls can be awkward, but he remembered me and warmly reaffirmed his offer, even though I now have two Englishmen in tow. So we've got a place to stay in Santa Cruz tomorrow.

San Francisco seems a bit dreamlike now...when I pitched my tent last night, it still smelled of the hotel room I had been airing it out in. I slept fitfully, even with the sounds of the ocean filling the air. All around the near horizon, the night's fog was aglow with the lights of nearby towns and roads, so that the tent never really got dark.

I'll be back there soon enough. In the meantime, I'll have to readjust to life on the road...

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We're in the hostel at Pigeon Point Lighthouse, after a 22-mile ride that seemed much longer than it actually was. I woke up this morning with a case of the blues, and never really came out of it during the day...bodyshock from yesterday's 40-miler, I think. Today's ride was fueled almost entirely by a loaf of banana bread that Erin baked for us our last day in San Francisco. We started out by slicing it, but eventually it seemed more efficient to just tear hunks off of it and munch it by the side of the road, crouched and hooting like monkeys. Good fuel, that, and tasty too. I'll be sad when it's gone.

The sun never really showed its face today, so the riding was chilly and gray. The hostel is the only place to stay between Half Moon Bay and Santa Cruz, and it's a good thing that it's here: none of us had 49 miles in us today. It'll take at least another couple of days before we start to get back into the road groove that we left somewhere on the south side of the Golden Gate.

And now: said lighthouse. It's got that grid on it because I'm so beat I didn't feel like leaving the dorm, so I took a picture of it through the window screen. There's a sign near it stating that it's been closed since 2001, and will probably fall over soon.

Hopefully, not while we're here.

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We arrived in Santa Cruz yesterday, and are camping out in the back yard at Josh and Kia's place. Very nice folks.

I'd write more, but it'll have to wait...I am just dead tired today, so I'm napping in my tent while Rich and Tom are downtown. Perhaps more, later this evening.

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That right there is the scourge of all campers. We're at Veteran's Memorial Park in Monterey, and I spied this guy up a tree about twenty feet from my tent. Rather than hassle with a hanging bag, I gathered all the foodlike stuff and put it in the coin-op locker in front of the restroom up the road a bit. Now I'll sleep better. And I need sleep: we did 50 miles today, from Santa Cruz. Rich and Tom are already sacked out, and I'm in my tent contorted in an L-shape on the floor around my cot so I can type.

Much of the ride today was flat, through agricultural regions: vast fields of earthly fragrant strawberries, spiky inedible-looking artichokes, and pale lettuce. One field of lettuce we passed through had been harvested recently, and the place smelled like an enormous salad.

I wish I had the energy to detail more of the day...especially the very last bit, which involved a laborious 400-foot climb up to the park...but I'm just entirely fashed. Not as fashed as yesterday, when I could barely put two intelligible words together. But fashed enough.

So: instead, here are some of the folks who've been in the news so often of late, picking strawberries for you.

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I'm on my own again - Tom and Rich were going to stay another day in Monterey, but I pretty much didn't like the place from the moment we crossed the city limits line, and felt an acute need to move on. They'll be staying at my mom's place in Santa Barbara, and we'll be doing the Six Flags Valencia thing as well, but it looks like I'll be finishing the journey alone, the way I started it.

Which is all symmetrical and bookend-like.

Right now, though, I've got to get packed and get out of here (Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park). I don't have a lot of miles to do -just 32 to Plaskett Creek Park - but there's a big climb to do, which by all accounts is narrow-to-no-shoulder, and I'd like to beat some of the traffic.

Here's a bit of what I saw on yesterday's ride: the fog layer, from about 600 feet.

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At the moment, I'm in a Travelodge in San Luis Obispo...the night before last, I was at a Super 8 in San Simeon. Tonight, I'll be at the state park in Oceana, a mere 15 miles from here. It was either that, or a 59-mile ride with a 980-climb at the end of it to Lompoc. That didn't seem like it would be much fun, so I opted for a short day today and a shorter ride to Lompoc on Saturday. Then, 35 miles to El Capitan State Park on Sunday, unless I feel like pressing on another 16 miles to Santa Barbara, which I very well might.

So there's a distinct possibility that I'll be finished with the trip on Sunday, or Monday at the latest.

I'm not at all sure how I feel about that. I've been ready to be done with this for a while, but now that the end is fast approaching, my feelings are almost too complex to put into words. It's been such a long time...I have no idea what it will be like to not live this way. It's a bit frightening.

Also a bit frightening is the return of the old medicine ball in the chest...I think, but I'm not sure, that I can attribute this to too many sugary sodas over the past couple of days. I say this because my mind is fairly calm, but my body is ready to jump out of its own skin, and the only thing I've done differently lately is have drinks that are loaded up with high fructose corn syrup...I'm planning to use my mom's glucometer once I reach Santa Barbara, to see if there's any correlation between my blood sugar and certain body sensations that mimic anxiety.

So, today, I get to do a short ride and then, basically, hang out in a state park all day, which is not really ideal when I'm jumpy like this. If there wasn't a big climb between here and Lompoc, I'd do the 60 miles, but I know that with the climb at the end it'd be a long and miserable ride, with another even higher climb to do first thing the next morning.

Now, I've got to get packed up and checked out...

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Checkout time was 11AM, and I only had 15 miles to ride. I really didn't want to arrive at the park at 1PM and then sit around reading at the picnic table until nightfall. I didn't want to eat camp food, either.

So, I rode 12.5 miles and grabbed a motel room in Pismo Beach. Spent the day flying my kite, ate steak and lobster, watched the sun set over the pier. Because that's what I felt like doing. So I did it. Felt good. Made me use fewer words.

Anyway...yeah, there's been a paucity of words on these pages lately...something like six entries since I left San Francisco. Some of that was due to the nature of the terrain around Big Sur: mountains on one side, ocean on the other, and curving coastline served to block reception, so that even my Kung Fu could not bring in the signal. Now, I'm able to get online just using the EVDO modem, without any of my gadgetry.

Which doesn't mean I've got anything much to say. The 25th would've been four months on the road (yes, the "On The Road: Week X" categories are wrong; I'll fix it later when I'm back in real space). I've got a couple of tough days ahead before it's all over, and I'm more focused on getting over a 980- and 1,200-foot climb than I am on What I Did This Summer And What It Meant To Me. That's for later...a later that's still a little difficult to think about.

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So this is it. One more morning of saddling up and pedaling off. One more climb. 52.6 more miles. Then...it's done.

I'm in Lompoc now, in a Motel 6, with the television making inane cartoon noises in the background. Tomorrow night, I'll be at my mom's house in Santa Barbara, and the next morning...I won't have anywhere to go. Nowhere to pedal. No campgrounds or motels to find my way to, no routes to program into the GPS, no high-energy foodstuffs to acquire, no Gatorade to chug.

In the coming weeks, I'll be sorting out the site, returning it to its pre-On The Road state. I've got thousands of pictures and a couple of hundred video clips to go through, so there will be more imagery to come.

And, of course, there will be more writing...the stories and thoughts I haven't told you, the inevitable What I Learned essays, and the whole Astonished Head Moves To San Francsico saga.

115 days on the road.

And the journey ends tomorrow.

How'd that happen?

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...there was the Big Not Moving.

Much of today's ride was spent on the shoulder of higher traffic roads like 101. I got two flats - a pinchflat on the right rear of the trailer, going flub flub flub after I hit a big rock at high speed on a downhill, and then the rear tire on the trike, about four miles from my mom's house. The rear wheel is a pain in the ass to change, because everything has to come off the trike, so I just pumped it up twice and pulled into the driveway at 3:50 PM.

And I ran over some road lizards and saw a mostly dead tarantula and bonked and and and and and...god I'm tired.

This, then, is the last official entry from The Road.

More later.

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...while I readjust to life in the non-touring world. Back in a bit.

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Here, then, is the final crew, left to right: Ian "Mad Scientist" Wood, Richard "It's All Good" Blackstock, Thomas "Havin' A Butcher's" Lipscombe, and Anthony "Kiwi" Irving. We first met Tony in Monterey, where he'd had his bike stolen from in front of the aquarium (one of the reasons I didn't like that town very much). After I left Rich and Tom in Monterey, they hung out there with Tony for a day, and then he stayed behind to pick up his shiny new bike, catching up with the boys again in Oceana a couple of days later. They'll be riding together down to the Mexican border, where Tony will high-tail it northwards to some airport somewhere to catch a flight down to South America. Rich and Tom will dispose of their bikes in whatever way seems best at the time, and head into Central America where they plan to become very rich by selling the contents of one medium-sized briefcase. Then they'll continue travelling until they'll reach Rio, where they will try not to catch the pox from watching volleyball on the beach.

And I? I shall fade, the way that great adventurers do, and--

Wait, that was a bit pretentious. Let's try:

Well, it's really done now, isn't it? Travelling companions have become erstwhile, and transformed into friends. My home has turned back into a trike which needs new tires and a tuneup. My tent remains rolled up in its stuff sack, doubtless in need of a good airing out and a fungicide treatment. I never know where any of my stuff is, because I now have more than a trailer's worth of space to lose things in. Tomorrow, I'll have been off the road for one week, but it feels like I left Virginia yesterday, and arrived in Santa Barbara a lifetime ago.

I am experiencing a sensation of dislocation that borders on vertiginous. The windchimes hanging from my mother's porch aren't ringing with a clear tone, because the strong wind makes them clang and noisily bind together. I feel the same way: there are no clear tones of Me, not quite yet. The transitions continue, and there's still much to be done. The fact that I pedaled nearly 2,000 miles for nearly four months to get here doesn't seem remarkable to me, sitting here on the couch, tossing pixelwords out into the tubes, just like I've been doing for the past four years. I remain a mote in spacetime.

And this mote needs a sandwich.

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Running 2,000 miles under heavy load up and down mountains does tend to contribute to mechanical entropy. But the list of items on the Greenspeed GTO that needed repair or replacement during or after the journey is pleasantly short: one SRAM DualDrive hub, one idler wheel, one cable housing, one shifter, one chain, three tires, one set of decals.

The hub was felled by a quality control gremlin, the idler wheel a casualty of a random road pebble and, to be fair, probably could have lasted the rest of the trip sans one geartooth. The cable housing was my own fault, eaten by the idler wheel because I routed it where it didn't belong after replacing a shifter cable. The Shimano bar-end shifter for the rear derailleur got all gunked up with seaside moisture, but after I disassembled it in the lobby of the Hotel de Shining in San Francisco, I decided that it would probably survive another 300 miles or so, and it did, barely. It's pretty crunchy in there right now, but its new-in-box replacement arrived today, courtesy of eBay. The chain had become an eight-foot wickedly gunked-up linky snake of griminess, so stretched out from hard pulls up steep grades that every time I stopped, I could feel it lengthen with the first pedal stroke. Velo Pro Cyclery in town had the three standard SRAM 9-speed chains I needed to make one trike-length chain, so now I've got a shiny silver powerline wrapped around my cogs and rings.

I've ordered a new set of tires from Hostel Shoppe Recumbents, and they'll be arriving this week. I ordered the same tires I toured on: Primo Comet kevlar-belted 20x1.5 herringbone slicks. I got nearly 2,000 miles out the front two, and the only reason I swapped out the rear tire with my spare in Eureka was because I couldn't be bothered to track down the rough bit on the inside of the old tire that kept putting holes in the tubes. The tires are now flattened in profile, with slashes, gouges, and missing chunks where the roads of four states have all taken bites from them.

I'd be able to show you said bites, but my trusty HP Photosmart M425, after surviving four months on the road, was done in by a roller coaster at Great Adventure on Friday. I usually wore my backpack on my chest on the rides, trying to arrange things so that nothing was crushing anything else, but at some point while I was being flung through space at ludicrous angles, something in the pack broke the camera's LCD display. As it doesn't have a regular viewfinder, that effectively ended the camera's usefulness. I'm trying to score a replacement display, or at least a cheap used M425 on eBay, but until I do the site will be a bit less photographic.

Repairing and cleaning up the trike has made me realize how much affection I actually have for it. It's been a dependable steed, backed up by an excellent company. That's why I ordered a fresh set of decals for it, to replace the ones that got scraped and mangled on the road: it deserves them. This evening, I spot-cleaned the Windwrap fairing with a paper towel soaked with a bit of gasoline, to remove the paint that had scraped onto it when I squeezed the trike through narrow motel room doorways. The manufacturer recommended using lemon Pledge to restore some of the polycarbonate's shine, and damned if it didn't do just that: there are scratches and some dull spots, but it's got most of its luster back. I've been riding the trike through town without the fairing for the past several days, but it'll be going back on tomorrow. I've missed it...the fairing gives a sense of enclosure to the trike, making it feel more like a vehicle, and it really does make a difference in terms of wind resistance and, I believe, visibility.

Finally, I've ordered a pair of new safety flags from Terra Trike. The six-foot rainbow banner, faded, torn, and road-grimed, has done its duty, and will now become an artifact. These new flags are for what I've decided will be my pedaled conveyance of choice, both here and in San Francisco.

The GTO's done right by me, and it should be ridden, not disassembled and kept in an apartment closet.

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Yes, the Google map thing is very out of date, and inaccurate to boot, and every time I set about working on it my eyes cross and I pass out. I'll fix it soon. Honest.

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Immediately after I wrote about my "dependable steed", the second DualDrive hub crapped out. Yesterday, I was seven or eight miles into a planned 20-mile ride out towards Montecito, when the hub began to behave in the peculiar way that means Something Is Terribly Wrong: not shifting properly, making strange grinding noises, bursting into flames, that sort of thing.

So, rather than head up 800 feet to the top of the ridge, I headed back to home base, where I removed the rear wheel and opened up the hub shell to have a look inside. The hub's innards are intricate and interesting-looking, full of precision-cut metal and little spring-loaded fiddly bits that flick in and out to move gears into different relationships with each other. The metal collar that secured three of those gears had, at some point, cracked into four pieces. Hence: grinding noises, explosions, etc.

Back in Kentucky, when the first hub failed, SRAM told the wrench at the Lexington bike shop that the DualDrive is "not spec'd for touring." I'm beginning to think they might be right. Paul Sims, the tech guy at Greenspeed, remains puzzled that I keep breaking the things, and Jerome, Greenspeed's US rep, is sending me a new hub, so I'm satisfied from a customer service standpoint.

Although the first hub lasted a mere 800 miles through the Appalachians, and the second hub 1,100 miles through some not-as-serious climbs along the West Coast, it's supposed to have a lifespan of many, many thousands of miles. My guess is that pulling a heavily-loaded trailer, hitched to one side of the trike's rear frame at the intersection of the chainstays and the seatstays, is just beyond the capabilities of the SRAM DualDrive. Either that or, as Paul suggested, I just "got two duds." We'll see.

In any case: the new tires are here, the new flags will arrive tomorrow, the new hub may or may not be here by Friday, so hopefully I'll be riding again by the weekend.

It's likely that the cracks in the collar began to develop while I was still heading down the coast. So I was within a week or two of having another hub failure while still on tour. I'm certainly glad that it deigned to hold together until I reached Santa Barbara, but think about what might have been: if I had pressed on across the country, I might've had a hub failure every thousand miles or so. That's five hubs.

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Having the trike out of action is making me a bit stir crazy. My body wants to take my mind out for a spin.

This readjustment isn't at all what I expected. Normally, when I'm hanging about doing nothing in particular, my sense of "needing to do something" usually has to do with something practical...do some work, write something, make some music. Now it's all about packing up the tent, hitching up the trailer, and heading odd to wherever it is I'm supposed to go today.

In having uprooted myself, I grew accustomed to rootlessness, but now I'm rootless and in one place, which doesn't feel quite right. I'm in limbo, again, which parallels how I was before I left at the end of May. Then, I was waiting for the house to sell, so that I could begin my journey. Now, I'm waiting for...what? There's time to spend here with mom, of course, while she recovers from her hip replacement. But at some point I must begin the practical tasks surrounding my relocation to San Francisco, things like job aquisition, apartment relocation, moving stuff from east to west. That's the Next Thing, but I haven't started it yet, so I feel odd and out of place.

Typical: for the last few weeks of the trip, I couldn't wait for its end. Now, I miss the motion of it all.

Like I said: not being able to trike is messing with me noggin a bit. I need to ride, as a middle way between motionlessness and constant travel. I hope the new hub arrives tomorrow, so that I can ride up a mountain, and look down the valley and across to the ocean, and remember where I've been, what I've done. It's becoming unreal to me.

Not only that, but my creative brain is full of fluff. Full of the Big Ideas, it is, but no focus at all, no ability to laser them into the pixels. Bit of a drag, seeing as how I've got all this free time now.

Tomorrow's another day...mebbe I'll have to spend it installing and testing my new hub! Yeah.

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