Day 13- Trip Motto: Must Be Flexible (Christi)

No caption needed 😂

September 21st, 2020

    Rise and shine! It was hard leaving behind the cozy cabin and showers, not knowing if we were going to have showers at the next stop. But we did have 25 miles of Avenue of the Giants left to bike, and that makes for a good day in the redwoods. Sadly it would be our last day in the redwoods, but we were excited for a change in scenery moving forward. We rolled out around 9AM and every small town we came across looked abandoned. Some buildings were boarded up and others had “closed” signs on the door collecting dust. We were happy to see that the “drive through” tree had a money box outside the entrance to put your fee into. Hoping others follow the same honor system. 

Looking up inside the “drive through” tree

    The coffee shop Brandon talked about was super cute and had a lot of crafty items inside to purchase. One thing I was impressed by was the world map on the wall that people had placed a pin needle on their home location. It was covered! There wasn’t much room to add a few pins on Portland, OR so we didn’t.

The US is COVERED

       Besides being in the redwoods for most of this ride, we also noticed that we were snaking along with the Eel River, and made multiple jokes every time we crossed it. We estimated we crossed a bridge over this river about 20 times. After the change of plans with our night’s stay we were excited for a 10-mile shorter ride this day and set out for Garberville. This town was a little more “hoppin’” than other places we had been to in the last few days. They had a few food carts and we managed to find some cold brews next door. After collecting our dinner we hiked down to the river, which was mostly dried up and more resembled a creek. It was nice to just relax for a few hours down by the river. 

Apparently we like to take pictures of beer cans

    

    Getting back to the hotel it was time to mentally prepare ourselves for the next day with killer elevation. Nothing could of prepared us for that, except maybe the last two weeks of straight riding 😂.

Road stats: 32 miles and 1,383 feet elevation gain

Road kill: 1 bird and 1 turkey

Weird things in the shoulder: broken sunglasses, 5 CO2 canisters, doormat, mask, chainsaw blade cover, and pee bottle