Pismo Beach to Lompoc, California

January 12, 2013

The way out of Pismo Beach produced some excitement for us, with the passing of the Amtrak Surfliner. This is the very train we intend to take home, and we had no idea that it passed this way. The train on our left occupied my attention, but fortunately Dodie usually has a 360 awareness. So she spotted on the other side of the street the Pismo State Beach Monarch Butterfly Grove. This is something we had searched for in Monterey and San Louis Obispo without success, and now without planning, here they were!

The monarchs migrate and overwinter here from the north, just like us. Their life cycle is fascinating, as we learned from placards at the site. We were disappointed at first because though all the signs and fences and walkways and such were there, we could not spot a butterfly. It was early, but another couple was already there, having driven up before a meeting in Morro Bay just to see this. (Hi, Eileen and Bill!). They too were puzzled and disappointed.

Here is where Dodie ramped up her 360 degree perception to include the forest canopy. She noted that many of the tree leaves were the wrong shape. Holy cow, it was clumps of zillions of Monarchs, huddled together with their wings closed in the near freezing early morning. Have a look at my photo attempts, but for more info and better photos check out the park's web site at www.monarchbutterfly.org

Monarchs. You may see them better if you zoom on the photo.

One unintended side effect of finding the monarch site is that we have an invitation to stay with Eileen and Bill at their place further south!

We reluctantly carried on, since clearly it would take hours for the monarchs to warm up enough to try some fluttering about. Quite a few kilometers of nondescript housing and RV parks eventually gave way to strawberry and broccoli fields. These fields are huge and often seem to stretch to the horizon. The strawberries in particular are impressive. They are all in raised beds, mulched with plastic film. They are not just casually mulched, but the plastic is wrapped with the precision of hospital beds. The new seedlings are placed three across the bed, but diagonally. The whole thing is mathematically precise, and on a massive scale.

We are not sure of all this planting crew is doing. There are three workers seated on the unit with plants in front of them, and the rest of the crew are following, maybe making sure the plants have gone in properly. It seems a strangely intense and dramatic operation when you see the movement and activity level of the crew.

The road offered views of farm machinery and supplies, a cooling plant, irrigation stuff - all things we former farmers enjoy looking at. Finally we entered the town of Guadaloupe. This is not a tourist place, but offers housing and restaurants to service the surrounding farm activities. As cyclists, we also found some great service at our first place offering Mexican bakery.

Where is Guadaloupe? Just check the side of this building.

We had learned about Mexican bakery products in Houston, where they are the only really edible baked goods in the city. Laurie was there on a research project, and the Mexican bakeries were critical in keeping her from having to buy supermarket junk. In Guadaloupe, the place we found was Romo's. In this little market was fresh baking and fresh hot food. We left with sweet buns and cookies and a quantity of pepper steak with rice. Outside the market we set out to store our find in plastic containers, but after one taste just ate it all up! We have lots of hope for more decent food as we draw closer to Mexico.

One further bit of decent food dropped into our laps as we came to a little strawberry stand. Most strawberry fields we saw were just starting out, with new transplants, but a few had matted rows of last year's plants. These had strawberries ripe now. At the stand, 2 pound flats were the smallest on offer, but the man gave us two small baskets, no charge. The berries were the familiar white cored California variety that we distain at home for their lack of flavour. However, here just out of the field they were fairly sweet.

It's a California strawberry, but still good.

The ACA map and the guidebook both would have had us leaving Highway 1 in favour of a road called the Harris Grade. We checked a few journals the night before but could not really extract the information on who had gone which way and what they found. We decided, for instance, that Art Birkmeyer had gone Harris Grade, but Art is such a good rider that he did not comment much on what the hill was like.

Anyway, we went with Highway 1, and found four significant hills, two of which were fairly serious. We had been concerned about hills for today, but in the end they were not really so terrible.

The Schwalbe Green Guard tire is no match for those stainless wires that must come from destroyed steel belted tires.

This memorial naturally caught our attention. There are yellow wristbands here from Livestrong, with a memorial message on them. I wonder what the background is.

Lompoc features about a 5 km strip full of restaurants, supermarkets, and motels. We phoned Motel 6 to get a baseline price for this town, though we lean to avoiding Motel 6 out of discomfort with the way they levy extra charges for microwave and wifi. We found a decent spot, a Budget Motel, and set out down the strip to buy some supplies. The nearest grocery was called Fresh&Easy, chain we did not know. We quickly found that it is very similar to Sainsbury's in England. That is, it has fresh and prepared foods in attractive packaging suitably sized for small families. There is stuff like yogurt with fruit and granola, cranberry chicken salad, tiramisu, and so on - hundreds of nicely packaged and prepared food treats. Having this in front of two cyclists that last ate eight hours and almost eighty hilly kilometers ago is a potent situation. We did not exactly buy the store out, but the bags were heavy leaving the store. We went back to our decent motel room (the one with hot hot water and real bath!) and had a lovely feast. Somehow, we even managed to save out some packages for tomorrow. It's amazing what all this real food today has given to our spirits.

Much like in England. This store was not exactly upscale, like Whole Foods, but everything was fresh and free from weird additives.

Today's ride: 78 km (48 miles)
Total: 1,896 km (1,177 miles)

Rate this entry's writing	Heart	2
Comment on this entry	Comment	0