July 14th: lots of riding, Golden Gate Bridge, Marin County, Muir Woods, more riding

[ Here are all the pictures I took from this day: https://picasaweb.google.com/110144623598348247797/20110714?authkey=Gv1sRgCI-AnafhnrLafg ]

I woke up and walked up Columbus Avenue until I got to the bike rental place. It was called 'Dave's Bikes' or something like that. I hired a bike for $18 or so. The shop guy and I took the bike outside. He told me to check it out and see if it's alright for me. Then he told me general directions for where I should go. He said to go north a couple of blocks until I get near to pier 49 and all that other tourist stuff, then turn left and ride along the coast until over the bridge etc. I asked him if I should ride on the road all the way or if I could take the footpath sometimes (the footpaths were fairly big and not too many people around and I was a bit nervous about riding next to cars). I was hoping I could since I wasn't so sure about riding around with traffic. I've never done that. But he said "the road. Always the road." So that was that settled: I'll have to go on the road.

I think that last evening, I bought some food ready for this journey. I bought a bunch of muesli bars, a bit of fruit, water, maybe nuts, and maybe other stuff.

I rode off and I started to get into it! You can take off pretty fast so that I don't think it's that much of a hassle for the cars. I was not sure how that would be. A few times I was riding all over the place in the middle of the three lane main road because I had to change lanes and so forth. I was getting into it. It was fun.

This was an epic day in terms of effort, and I took some pictures, but probably not as many as I could have, because it's a bit hard to stop riding and get your camera out at every small opportunity in comparison to when you're not attached to the bike.

Here I am after I'd been riding for a while. I'm next to some kind of big green space which is just a bit before the bridge. The top gear was grinding a bit so I wanted to see what was up with that. I think that the metal thing that guides the chain onto each gear needs to be adjusted a bit. I don't think I can do it here, so I decided to just not use that one.

I got to a place underneath the Golden Gate Bridge and I decided to lock the bike up and chill out for a while. For some reason I always associate this place underneath the bridge with the place where the robot from the book/movie Bicentennial Man goes to find the guy who can help make him more human. I don't know why, in the movie, they made that guy own the place underneath this bridge. I think it would be hugely expensive at any point in time... I was confused. I don't think that would happen.

I was sitting here eating some things and then I saw some dolphins jumping through the waves!

It doesn't look like it here, but at some points this walkway was very crowded with people walking along. You have to use the bell quite a bit to tell them to move.

Looking back over the city from the bridge.

I made it across the bridge. Hooray! Now I had to navigate the roads to find my way to Muir Woods. I headed through this place called "Marin County". Supposedly it's quite a nice looking place with some horse farms and those kinds of things.

I had to go through this tunnel. I didn't really like the prospect of this, to be honest. It was quite narrow and I was riding fairly slow because the bike isn't really a great one that lets you get best efficiency from your efforts and my concern was mainly that a car would come up behind me and get frustrated or try to overtake but that then another car would come the other way and because the tunnel is quite narrow, it might not be good.

But I made it. I found it all fairly amusing really. Then I rode a little way further and found that the whole road was being repaired so that it was local traffic only and that actually the route I wanted to take probably started a little bit later than I'd figured. So I road back through the tunnel the other way.

Then I came up to this tunnel! A bit amusing. People who ride probably aren't too bothered by any of this. It was just that I haven't really been riding with traffic before. This road through this tunnel goes slightly up hill and it's a decent length of something like 1km.

I get a special button because I'm on a bike.

I rode through that tunnel and it was very gruelling work. I first had to wait while cars came through from the opposite direction. Cars built up behind me and then eventually the light went green. I was determined to set a good speed so that I would make it through before the lights changed and cars started coming from the opposite direction again. The cars behind me all overtook me fairly quickly. Then I had a long slog of pushing the bike along up the hill for a considerable distance. I started off pretty good but eventually I became exhausted and ended up going quite slowly. The ending of the tunnel seemingly never came. It was very long. Inevitably the cars came at me from the opposite direction but they didn't seem too concerned. I made it through alive in the end!

On the other side of the tunnel.

I had a great time riding along these roads with great scenery around me.

The map told me to leave the road at some point and find this track leading up through the hills. A guy walking his dog told me I was probably at the right place.

This is the land I rode through now. This is Marin County.

The track was uphill for quite a way. I rode some of this at first, almost to the top, and then got exhausted and also finding that it was sometimes too steep so that the wheels just spun on the loose rocks.

There is a snake hiding in there! It might be visible if the resolution of the uploaded picture is high enough. It is visible in the original.

A view down to the coast. At this time I was thinking that these views are all fairly amazing. Also the clouds were all moving quite fast I think, which was a nice effect. After this the track went downhill for quite a while, down into a valley. That was really fun riding!

Down in the valley there is a horse ranch that I think you can visit. The track goes slightly through this and there are signs asking you to get off the bike if you were on one so that you don't scare the horses or something.

Another view to the ocean. I'm taking a slight detour to see this.

The Pacific Ocean! Australia is on the other side of that.

There were some huge waves crashing into this beach. None of the pictures captured this. You really wouldn't have wanted to swim here on this day...

I headed back out again (after seeing two more snakes. These ones had yellow stripes going lengthwise down their body, I think. They were almost squashed by my bike.) and then went up another hill out of this valley. I wasn't really sure if I was on the right trail because the map I had was a bit vague. It was just a trivial map given by a different bike hire place that isn't really meant to be used for this, I don't think... I saw this thing and tried to see if it could help with the situation. I think I left feeling more confused.

After the last photo, I spent a lot of time pushing the bike uphill. I was very exhausted and I was completely exposed to the sun all this time. So then I came to this point where the trail appears to be all downhill for a while. I was very happy. It was great fun riding down through here. When in Washington D.C., Jay, the guy from Texas, was telling me that he lived on a houseboat here in San Francisco for a while and that he's also into riding mountain bikes, I think on trails like this where I'm riding now. I'm starting to see that would be a really fun thing to do more regularly. ...Especially the downhill parts.

This is a town around a place called Muir Beach. On the trail, a little further ahead, I see now that you can actually see the two people whom I almost wiped out. I thought they would have heard me grinding the path up behind them. But apparently not. Anyway they weren't too fussed.

I went through Muir Beach then pushed on until I was on this road which goes beside a stream. I'm very close to being at Muir Woods! I was not sure that I would be able to get there. A guy at one of the bike stores told me that there was no way I'd be able to get there because it's too far and there are cars and so on. But at this point I know I will make it! I was very excited. I also had felt fairly sure that if I didn't make it today, I probably wouldn't have time to go by another method, so this encouraged me to push on over those hills with the sun hammering me with rays.

Muir Woods. Hooray. I made it!

This type of tree are actually the tallest trees in the world. It's a bit hard to capture their height in pictures. You can kind of capture it if you get some people to stand next to one. But if you do that then you also can't see how tall the tree is, just the bottom of it. In this picture, it looks like the rails must be ankle height or something, for the trees to make sense, but I think they were full height. The trees are very big.

Uhoh.

Easily fixed.

Since I was in the closed off area there were no other people walking through talking about inane things. So, I thought about what that guy from the bike hire place said about how he likes to ride up into Muir Woods and sleep there, looking up into the trees. I gave it a shot, minus the sleeping part. Plus I was quite exhausted from the ride and it was good to lie down. The trees are massive. It was quite nice.

I wonder if the scenes from the third star wars movie with the ewoks and the 'speeder bikes' were shot in these forests or ones near here, since George Lucas lives just a little to the north of where I am and it looks pretty much the same... I'm not really enough of a fan to know.

I got back on my bike and tried to make it back before the bike hire store closed. Unfortunately I had no idea when the store was supposed to close and I didn't have their phone number or a phone call them on. I made an ambitious guess as to when they might close. Muir Woods is down in a kind of valley. So I had to go up another hill again. My legs were completely wrecked from all the riding so far and the hills were a little steep, so I walked the bike up most of this way.

The scenery was good.

I made it to the top of these hills and then I was on some kind of small highway. Then the road started to go down. I got on the bike to take advantage of this. At one time I realised that there were cars coming up behind me. I wasn't sure how they would feel about having a slow rider curbing their progress. But with the hill I got some very good speeds. Then, the road became a bit windy, in addition to the downhill. I was getting great speed through the corners since I didn't have to brake much and I realised that I was leaving the cars far behind me. I then decided to use the whole of my lane to maximise speed. It was very good fun and the wind and shade from trees was good after all the exposure in the sun. As I continued, I realised that I was actually catching up to some cars in front of me. But then the road started to level out a bit more and I lost them. If I could have used the top gear it might have been better.

I came down into a town that is a little way north of Golden Gate Bridge. I didn't stop to check it out. I was trying to get back to the shop before they were to close.

In the town there is a path along this river thing. It was good to be off the road again.

I slogged my way along the road heading south, slightly up-hill, trying to reach the place where a ferry leaves heading for the city. It's a common plan for people to hire a bike, ride across the bridge, and then head back on the ferry and I thought that would be fun. But I got there, and I had missed the previous ferry by just a few minutes. The next ferry would arrive in one hour. Given that I'd then have to ride through the streets and find the shop, it meant that I'd definitely be late. I was quite worried about this because I thought it possible that the shop could charge me quite a high rate for having had the bike overnight. So I decided to race back across the bridge and see if I could make it. I figured I had a slight chance if I rode fast.

Riding back was incredibly gruelling. My leg muscles had nothing left. The slightest incline forced me to get off and walk.

I eventually made it back. I found the bike store. The store was closed. It actually closed considerably earlier than I had estimated so that there was no way I would have made it back in time even if I had caught that ferry I missed by a few minutes.

So I rode up/down Columbus Avenue towards Chinatown/downtown etc. It was kind of busy traffic hour now and I was right in the city. But I'd been on the bike all day in strange situations and I was feeling quite alright about it. Most of the way back was downhill so I had a really good speed and was beating most of the traffic. I think I'll have to get into cycling more!

I made it back to the hostel in china town and I pulled my bike up a few flights of stairs and chained it to the stair rails. Curiously I noticed that there were two or three other bikes from the same store that were also chained to the stair rails. I wonder if they had a similar experience.

I was very tired but I think I managed to cook myself a huge plate of pasta. It was enjoyed.

After all of this I made estimates about how far I rode. I estimated a possible 30 or 40 km. I mapped the route with google earth later and found that it was at least 62km.

This is the route I took.

There was no insomnia this night.