Bike Tour in the 'Big South'

A lot of my blog postings are following the pattern "In 2007 this, but 2008 that". This one is no different.

In 2007, after my internship was over, I hired a car and drove a crazy arc of thousands of miles all the way up the West Coast, through 4 states, ending up at the Burning Man festival in Nevada in which huge amounts of flammable anything went up in the air.




In 2008, I just got on my bicycle and rode a 750km loop south of San Francisco, to the Big Sur, on the spectacularly curved coastline hugged by the old Highway 1.

Children of the Vines

Pierre and Nicki, old friends from my undergrad days in South Africa, flew over from Chicago to spend the weekend. We hired a car and drove up to the Napa and Sonoma Valleys where we encountered lots of wine and sweet scenery, but no Russian River (we looked all over the place for it and couldn't find it. Maybe we were drunk at this stage). The photo shows us looking for the river. Fortunately we could eat grapes along the way.

Pierre and Nicki also got to experience San Francisco in all its many-splendoured diversity, including Tenderloin junkies using our car as a shelter to get a fix and a man with a giant cloth snake around his neck stripping naked to sun bathe in the Mission Dolores park as we sat there on Sunday morning munching our fine baked breakfast. Bon Apetit!