Well, last night was comfortable, under the redwoods. But extremely cold. Two pairs of socks, long johns and jeans, 4 layers above, woolly hat down to below my eyes. Then 2 sleeping bags, one inside the other. Still perishing. Thinking tonight I might add my gauntlets to keep fingers warm and wear my motorbike helmet (face freezing otherwise). Camping can be wonderful; and motels are expensive; but the downside of very cold camping is: peeing in the night. (Sing to the tune of ‘Strangers in the Night.’) You need to, but you just don’t want to. I forgot to mention yesterday – we saw an (1) elk. This is a pretty feeble fauna count compared to, say, Steve’s African bike trip 5 years ago. But still. The elk was quietly munching, surrounded by cellphone camera-snapping tourists as if it was the Loch Ness Monster.

If last night was cold, biking was even colder, on the gorgeous Oregon coast. In Port Orford we stopped beside the celebrated Battle Rock where the first 9 white settlers held off the native population before slipping away under cover of night. (And returning with 61 more settlers and plenty of guns.) We’ve left the redwoods behind; Joe says he’s over the redwoods now. In Port Orford I was able to phone in to Roll on the Radio on whvw.com, my own usual Saturday gig, and speak on air to my super-sub, Tom Grasso, editor of Roll Magazine, our sponsor. I didn’t like to say so on air but getting out of California into Oregon is like… well, to me California is a species of giant leech. Oregon revives my spirit. A place that gives rather than takes. First thing that happened was that we stopped for gas at a Chevron station and out strode two young men to fill our bikes for us. Nowhere in America have we experienced this blast from the past (nor expected to). Oregon is another planet. Calm, quiet and not devoted to scamming the world and draining its money in exchange for Tinseltown fool’s gold.

5000 miles in, and Joe and I have developed a humorous form of twosome biking: our very different bikes determine it, Joe’s a frisky beast liberated by interesting, twisty curves, mine a tortoise at ease only on dull straightaways. We overtake each other at irregular but frequent intervals. When Joe overtakes me he roars away into the distance until he finally waits up for me to catch up; when I overtake Joe he drops way back to give himself a sporting challenge and see how long it takes him to catch me. Joe agrees: 101 is one of the best designed roads we’ve ever ridden – designed for speed but weaving glorious curves and dallying in small towns. The sight of Oregon logging depots takes me at once to a young Ken Kesey returning home from college in Sometimes A Great Notion, one of the longest and dullest books ever written by a great writer. It could at least have spawned a skin moisturizing cream called Sometimes A Great Lotion. Among my school pals the book was known as Sometimes A Great Motion, for reasons that should not grace a polite blog.

…in today’s update. First person to submit correct answer wins a masterful sepia-toned water-color sketch of the NorthWest coast, just as soon as I get it dry and pick the pine needles out of it. I forgot to mention yesterday that we passed through Petaluma, holy shrine for me (as egg-lover) because it is the world epicentre of the egg. Produces more than anywhere else. (It’s also where Nolan, my beloved opera-collaborator, lives, tho’ alas he’s in Italy with his family right now.) In Petaluma posters announced a concert featuring Eddie Money and other oldies including a Fogerty-less ‘Creedence Clearwater Revisited,’ which sounds oddly demure compared to ‘Revival.’ In Petaluma we also saw a man walking, a puzzling sight in California until the orange-red item he was swinging lightly in one hand made sense of it all. It was an empty gas can.

Gentle reader, apart from news of Joe’s coccyx (much improved) and my dead-leg (improved, and now living & partly living), I have spared you medical bulletins. After all, this isn’t Scott of the Antarctic. Lost another man today. We ate his dog, with the last of the caramelized onions. But even a more modest adventure has its trials. I managed to wedge my right foot under the bike (the foot doesn’t feel too bad but I haven’t seen it lately – that’s what camping does to you – to report on how it looks) and I acquired an earache in my left ear, the port-side or ocean-side ear, strong enough to prevent me from chewing anything. Pain mild until chewing began. Was contemplating a future of sipping clam chowder through a straw. Earache seems to be receding, unless it’s just the ibuprofen I’ve been taking.

Despite the same savage wind as before, we had some spectacular biking today – punctuated by overpowering blasts of the salty-apricot perfume of golden gorse blossom on both sides of the road – past tempestuous, sunlit beaches, but most notably through a redwood cathedral lasting many miles and putting to shame all manmade cathedrals except the Sagrada Familia. And nothing in the Sagrada Familia, or at Chartres or at the Acropolis makes one want to give each pillar a human name, as each of the great old redwoods seem to require. They call forth a kind of tender, tearful awe as if coming face to face with the ancestors – which in a sense they are. Reduced by their scale to the size of a tree-shrew, it’s with tree-shrew eyes that we gaze at them.

Reached at last the Crescent City campsite, to be greeted by a gorgeous, shaggy, white ‘Native American dog’ (a breed reinvented using Malamute and other strains) and the finest hydrangeas I’ve ever seen. Our pitch is in a grove of young redwoods only a hundred or so years old; Joe speaks of finding a redwood to hug and I’ve been warning him that a redwood small enough for him to hug may be an underage redwood, with who knows what hell to pay from mature tree-huggers. Joe made us his usual fine meal; I as usual blundered off into the dark with the pots & pans, dishes and cutlery, to wash them at the nearest bathroom. I was able to chew the meal without pain so I think the earache alarm is over. Now to see what it’s like to sleep within a redwood grove, on ancient leaf-mold.

The coldest winter I ever spent, wrote Mark Twain, was a summer in San Francisco. But today we got lucky! The coastline north of San Francisco, cold and foggy the last 2 days, suddenly shed its shrouds and we rode in blazing sun through a chilly wind. A smell of wild fennel, as we left SF, assailed me with memories of the Ligurian coast where I was raised overlooking the Mediterranean. Same flora. The cliffs we rode along reminded me of somewhere quite else, with their grassy promontories and steep slopes – North Devon. When an ocean bites into the land, the jaw marks look the same. And here at last we met truly twisty roads.

More wonderful piney smells, riding north, and, above us, more hawks than ever, riding the thermals where the water meets the steep cliffs. More than once on this trip I’ve noticed one tiny bird, almost invisible it’s so small, mobbing a hawk and driving it off. Birds are fearless, unimpressed by size.

Pausing in tiny Point Arena, I decided I had enough gas to reach Elk, a town on the way to Fort Bragg, along Highway 1. I barely made it, and found no gas pumps there. 10 miles to go till Albion, the next hamlet with a pump. Prices are arbitrary here: $4.07 a gallon in Fort Bragg, $6.00 a gallon in if-you’re-here-you-can-afford-it Mendocino. The Elk garage gave me a gallon at $4.37 (and tiny Albion two more at $4.47) and supplied it straight from the barrel, as it were – from the motherlode of petrol, huge tanks out at the sweet lonely back yard of the 100-year old garage.

So unlike Elk City, that sad empty place we passed through a week or so back, like a dying, tick-laden beast afflicted with franchises, Elk is a tiny thriving place: its grocery, overlooking the ocean and the cliffs, is full of wondrous home-made jams, delicious sandwiches. Small is not only beautiful here, but survives.

The Caning Shop. This one too is for Steve. And for anyone who like me had the ill fortune to be caned (twice in my case) at British boarding school. So if you miss it desperately enough, it seems like maybe you can buy some, here, in California where you can buy just about anything. I spotted this place in Berkeley while looking for our book distributors, on 7th street.

After my visit there with Laura Moriarty, distribution manager and eminent poet, I met up with Dave, a very dear former student, from all the way back into my University of California teaching days, and a terrific writer. Raised, like me, in showbiz. By chance he even bears the name ‘Cary,’ which he has used from time to time. And he’d ordered my new book. Gotta love a guy who does that. On this trip I’ve met up with a gallery of students of ever-increasing maturity. One of 40, one of 50 and one of 60: another decade heard from. That’s pretty much as far back as it goes.

Can’t stop riding even in sleep. Biking all through my dreams. Joe says this is bad and I need to rest. So today, in beautiful Point Richmond north of San Francisco where my old pal Matty, former student, brilliant fiction writer and inventor of menglish, a unique form of the English language, lives with his lady, Molly, I have only two engagements so far, both in Berkeley. Steve wrote to ask how we manage with laundry. It is indeed the big question. Never mind negotiating 18-wheelers at 80 mph. Laundry. I take shirt and underclothes into the shower. There’s usually a shower on campsite. Or in motel. I save up motel soap. Dissolve in hot water. Add clothes – and trample as needed. Shirt collar after a day on the road looks like I’m a coalminer. Scrubbed against itself, collar comes out of the shower acceptable. These are the ancient arts.

Last night I dreamt about my father. I don’t remember ever doing that before. But he was Julian Sands, or Julian Sands was he. Made an admirable Rex. I hope this is a good omen.