Bike Odyssey 2014 – Day 23 (June 8) – Back to reality

One moment I’m at Jeff Lynne’s sitting in his recording studio quaffing champagne & listening to demo tapes of new songs and being driven by mine host in his Cadillac back to a guest room bed whose comfort I don’t think I’ve experienced anywhere. Then – tonight, as I pictured it – at the San Luis Obispo campsite putting up my tent and wheezing long and hard into my inflatable sleeping mat and happy as a clam. Happier, really. (Just as well.)

Instead: Pismo. Sounds like a contraction of Pepto-Bismol. Pismo Beach. Must be a delightful place in summer. Oh wait, it is summer. But it’s freezing – freezing – cold. One of those glorious quirks of American weather (I learnt all about crazy weather when teaching in Texas). Joe and I confessed to being colder today riding up the Pacific Coast than we had been during the entire trip, including the infamous ‘Big Meadows’ night in the Blue Ridge mountains, when the temperature fell into the 30s Fahrenheit. The guilty party was an icy fog off the sea, creating a strip of micro-climate which vanished as you went inland; nonetheless, wet-suited surfers by the hundred had flocked to the ocean, to be sure not to waste a weekend. We juddered our way up to San Luis Obispo, and shrank from the prospect of putting up a tent with freezing fingers. Tomorrow… God willing… on the famous Highway 1 section up through Big Sur and Carmel, the weather will give us a break. We keep hearing about how it’s 106 degrees in Northern California. We already did 106; 110 in fact; couldn’t we have a nice moderate climate, please?

We’ve had several candidates for sweetest city on our tour of America; for sheer unpleasantness no city approaches, in my view, the one we just left: Los Angeles. For one reason only. Its drivers. L.A. has so many gorgeous neighborhoods, a match for any city anywhere. And if you could just stay in your neighborhood! (As many do.) You mightn’t think bad drivers could make so much difference. Have you been to the Far East? If you have you probably think you’ve experienced bad driving at its finest. In that case you’ve never been to L.A., or experienced finding yourself hurled into Death Race 2000 at a few moments’ notice every time you hop onto one of the seemingly innumerable freeways, overlapping, underlapping, mapping this tortured city as if it were an electric-chair victim criss-crossed with exploding veins. Remember ‘On The Beach,’ the movie about one last suicidal car race at the end of the world? Try shifting lanes (on 4 wheels or 2) all the way across a 6-lane highway with 80-mile-an-hour madness in every lane. It’s enough to make you want to live somewhere else. L.A. doesn’t need a Grand Prix. It is a Grand Prix. 24/7. (Tho’ of course if that’s how you like it…) It’s not just in L.A.. Driving north up 101, trying to work up enough speed not to be rocked by passing cars, I gave up at 80 (on a 65 mph speed limit highway) when every single car on the road was going 10 mph or more faster. Living the dream – or living a video game?