Are You Living It?

Just returned from the Tour of the Unknown Coast (TUC) in Ferndale. A beautiful victorian town on the California coast. The towns history is mainly dairy farming, so lots of rollong hills and pasture land to ride through. The TUC Century is said to be one of the toughest around, not because of the amount of climbing, but because the gradient of the climbs is so steep. I must admit that the two steep sections made my legs cry for mercy. I seem to have lost that third little front sprocket and this was the one day over the past few years that it would have come in handy.

The climbs were a test but the real reason the TUC is so hard was on the surface of the road. The coast range gets a huge amount of rain each year and the ground is routinely saturated. Many of the roads, cut into steep hillsides, seem to have difficulty staying put! Either the road wants to slide off down the hill, or sections just sink and leave a void. The repairs must be made so frequently that a shovel full of asphalt fills a hole and gets a nice rounded top to it. This may be be due to the local history’s influence on the road department. The town of Petrolia, along the Matole River, was one of the first places to see oil wells in California. Mix this history with the dairy farming culture over the hill and it’s reasonable that the road patches resemble Asphalt Cow Pies. They don’t leave you with a bad taste in your mouth, but your teeth seem a little looser by the end of the ride.

The Tour of the Unknown Coast was one of the prettiest rides I have been on. The route through the redwood forest was amazing. The section along the beach and waves will be remembered for it’s steady headwind and the road to nowhere, unless you can climb the 18% grade a the end! I am hoping that like much of the suffering my body takes atop my bike, I will forget the bouncing, chattering and chaffing of my bum, and glide across the Asphalt Cow Pies a year from now. Well, maybe two years from now!