Into the Desert

Yesterday, I found this quote in a little notebook sitting in a cave halfway up a rock face in Joshua Tree: "Life begins at the end of your comfort zone."

I can't imagine any advice more perfect for me right now. My batteries are charged, my water bottles are full, I took a sponge bath in the park bathroom, my laundry is hanging to dry on my bike, and I have enough food to last me until Parker. As soon as the post office opens, I will pick up my bike computer and multi tool, and then I will be off, into the desert. I'm ready to live!

Love, peace, and inspiration,
Sonya

Alone

Joshua Tree's rocks

I've never really been alone before. Not like this. It's an entirely different feeling to be in the middle of the desert with only my bike and its contents to keep me company. My bike, my lovely bike, what would I do without it? At one point, it felt like this was all I needed, but now, I'm starting to change my mind. If my knees were healthy, that would be completely true, but the truth is, they're not and I have 110 miles of Highway 62 between me and Parker Arizona. 110 miles of busy, shoulder-less highway with no services, no water, and no cover to camp in. It's a disaster waiting to happen.

Okay, okay, I'm being a little too melodramatic. After all, I just saw my mother, I have a package with a replacement multi-tool, bike computer, passport and in-soles coming in the mail, the Highway Patrol officers agreed to look out for me when I am on 62, and I have Joshua Tree National Park. This place is truly amazing.

Mama and I drove into the Park on Monday, after staying at a lovely warm showers place in Yucca Valley, and even though I am anxious to get back on the road, I am glad to have the opportunity to spend more time here. It is a desert, harsh, dry, hot and unwelcoming, but breathtakingly beautiful. It was quite a shock to come here after biking through San Bernardino National Forest for two days.

Mama!

On Friday, I arrived in San Bernardino a little after noon, and biked up to the beginning of the National Forest where I found a perfect camping spot by a crystal clear stream. The next day, I biked slowly, stopping every hour or so to stretch. By the end of my nine hour day, I had only covered 30 miles (according to the mile post signs, my bike computer got run over), but I had gained gained 5,443 ft in elevation and my knee was still fairing relatively well. That night, I camped at Onyx Summit, 8,443 ft above sea level, and probably the highest point I will reach on this trip. There was snow on the ground a few feet from my tent!

Flowers in the desert

In the morning, I got on my bike and coasted into Big Bear City where I waited for my mom. She drove out to meet me from Phoenix and we spent a wonderful few days together. The ride from Big Bear to Yucca Valley was more than twice as long as the previous day's trip, but it took half the time. From Big Bear, the road was steep, twisty, and gorgeous. The turns were so sharp, you had to lean into them with your whole body. Ten miles further, 3,000 ft lower and 20 degrees hotter, the road shot us straight into the desert, my new home.

I have a lot to get used to on this section of my trip. Doing an unsupported solo bike tour on a challenging route in unfamiliar territory takes a great deal of preparation, strength and determination. Now that I am truly on my own, I have discovered fear that I hadn't been aware of, and this fear is manifesting itself in insecurity and self doubt. When people ask where I am going, my responding "Vermont" is fast dwindling in assurance, but I remain hopeful. This fear and uncertainty is a doorway into a new level of self awareness, strength and passion if I can embrace it.

Love, peace, and determination,
Sonya

Lichen...I think

Amazing trees

Letting go

My eyes opened and the startling clarity of my surroundings leaped, as a dolphin breaching the ocean's glassy surface, into my consciousness; the lights from the oil rigs, paling in the sunrise which painted vivid streaks of orange, pink and gold across the sky, the rumblings of the awakening city at my back, the waves, diving recklessly into the sand, the gulls screeching overhead, and the presence of the people beside me. I felt the sand at my feet, the tingling in my legs as I unbent them from their crossed position, the soft weight of my sarong I'd wrapped around my legs to keep them warm in the cool ocean breeze.

 It was 7:00 on Tuesday morning, and I had endless strands of decisions ahead of me, but after forty five minutes of meditation, the unanswered questions no longer gnawed at me. I felt alive in the present moment, and even if my knees were prohibiting me from completing the route I had planned, it wasn't the end of the world.

Riding along the bay

It has been a long path to arrive at this conclusion, but in the end, all my frustrations have been worthwhile. I was looking for a challenge when I decided to do this trip, and even though the challenges haven't been of the sort I was expecting, I am learning more from them than I would learn from pushing my muscles to exhaustion every day. I left home 25 days ago, and I have only biked over thirty miles on seven of those days. This is the price I've paid for not paying attention to my knees when they first began to hurt and adjusting my pedals. Now they are damaged and though I will have to go slowly as they heal, I believe they will heal and I will be able to pick up the pace later.

They call it the Los Angeles River...
but where did the water go?

Injuries always heal more slowly than one would like, but I have found that I am able to bike for at least two or three hours before my knees start to hurt and five or six hours before the pain is too excruciating to really make any progress at all. Perhaps that's not something I ought to have figured out, but if you were in the middle of Wilmington at 4:00 in the afternoon with forty miles to go until the camp site you had planned to stay at, I doubt you would have wanted to stop and camp. You probably wouldn't have ended up in that particular situation anyway though; it takes a lot of irrational decisions to be biking along Anaheim St. at 4:00 in the afternoon having been biking at a decent pace since 9:45 AM from the center of Los Angeles.

To make a jungle in the desert.

Sunday was not my day for rational decisions. After a delicious breakfast, Quinn and I left his house and biked down Venice Boulevard to the beach where Quinn turned home and I continued South down the coast. Simple enough right? Just head to the ocean and go south. If only that were the case. For some reason, I had the impression that I was going to end up much farther down the coast if I biked straight to the ocean from central LA. I had looked at the maps, and even made rough distance estimates, but my navigational planning was nothing short of miserable for that day.

The ride from San Francisco to San Luis Obispo, almost exclusively on Highway 1, spoiled me and I had forgotten how many turns you have to make in a city. After several hours of biking, I realized I wasn't even where I thought I was going to start biking down the coast, and I still had over fifty miles to go before Crystal Cove State Park, my planned destination. I found my location on the maps and determined that I was off of the route, but I decided that I was going to keep going in the way I had been going anyway. These sort of thoroughly illogical notions continued to plague me all day. I would ask for directions and follow them most of the way, but then take a different road at the end because, well, I don't know, it seemed like maybe it would get me somewhere more quickly.

 To make matters worse, the roads I biked on continued to deteriorate as I strayed further and further from the route. Through San Pedro and Wilmington, there are few bike lanes and heavy traffic, though the shoulders were quite wide. These cities are the shipping harbors behind LA, where all the imports land. They are ugly places, full of big trucks, metal crates, concrete and sketchy streets, but it is nonetheless an interesting area, for it makes apparent the workings behind Los Angeles' splendor. All the imported wine and expensive perfumes come through San Pedro, and all the people who work the ships are chained to the city's consumption.

Grocery shopping :)

Eventually, I managed to get myself to the bike path in Long Beach, but my prospects were looking grim. It was 5:00 already, my knees were aching and there were still twenty five miles between me and Crystal Cove State Park. That was when I got an email from Jen. "No worries," she wrote, "I would love to host you for the night." And with these simple words, my situation reversed itself. I had written to a few Warm Showers hosts in the Long Beach area earlier that afternoon on the off chance that they might be able to host me on such late notice, and when I heard back from Jen, a senior in college, I was amazed. Warm Showers is just incredible.

I picked up some food for us to make dinner and when I finally found my way to Jen's place (after more terrible navigation), she came out and gave me a hug. We cooked dinner together, talked, laughed and shared our stories. Jen made me feel completely at home in her apartment and when she asked if I would like to join her for meditation on the beach the next morning, I readily agreed. We rose at 5:45 and biked down to the beach to join one of Jen's friends in his morning meditation by the sea. The quiet, grounding space to welcome the day was a blessing, and it allowed me to get out of my irrational mindset.

American the beautiful...Carson city

Meditation gave me the perspective to see that continuing south with the condition my knees were would be a poor, if not disastrous decision, so I decided to spend one more night with Jen and then go back to LA. The day of swimming, reading, sleeping and stretching allowed my knees to recover considerably, and spending more time with Jen was just wonderful. She is going to bike from Oregon to Chicago this summer and it was exciting to hear about her planning. More than our connection over biking though, talking with Jen was simply inspiring, and I feel very lucky to have had the chance to meet her.

A forgotten companion

On Tuesday, I went to meditation again and then hit the road. Going back to Quinn's house was, not surprisingly, several hours faster and probably ten miles shorter than my original trip. The route was not particularly exciting, but being a Tuesday, there was less traffic on the beach bike paths, and rather than going through Wilmington and San Pedro, I went through Carson and Torrance which boast car dealerships and factories instead of shipping grounds. My knees did fairly well until early afternoon, when I had to stop and rest for a while, but when I changed my sandals out for my bike shoes, I felt completely fine for the rest of the ride. I have been adjusting my clips and seat heigh/position and experimenting with riding with my sandals so that I'm not clipped in. At this point, I've tried out so many different things that I can't remember what it felt like originally, but I think I have made some progress.

Ahhh, acupuncture...

Being back with Quinn's family has been wonderful. They are so kind to me, and I have come to know Los Angeles pretty well in the last week and a half of walking and biking around the city. I have one last acupuncture appointment tomorrow morning, after which I will take the metro to San Bernardino and start heading towards Joshua Tree, slowly. I have decided that I will just do short days of biking until my knee has healed completely because doing some biking does seem to help, and I want to keep moving. Nothing is definite however, and I am prepared to adapt, because I know that the only place I can live is the present.

Love, peace and new beginnings,
Sonya

PS. Sorry about the bad photographs, I have been using my smart phone and it is difficult to take anything more than a snap shot with it.

Where the sidewalk begins

Rest, Relaxation and Logistics

If I were a bear....

My knee is better. This I can say with assurance. Whether it will remain that way when I get back on the road, I can only guess, but I am grateful that I have healed enough to venture out again. This week has been a confusing roller coaster of hopefulness and despair as I find the balance between rest and exercise that allows my knee to heal. Each day, I had a different idea about where I was going to be by the end of the week, and half the time, that idea was more of a wish than a plan. Biking for a week and then taking at least a few days off to evaluate your progress, fine tune your gear set-up, and figure out the rest of the trip does seem to be the ideal way to start an expedition however, for it gives you a chance to gather confidence before heading into the meat of the expedition. Today, my knee feels good, even after a bike ride, and my poison oak has been reduced to scabs and scars which barely itch. I am ready to head out tomorrow. 

 Between icing and heating my knee, stretching, going for long, rambling walks in the city, cleaning and oiling my bike, adjusting my pedals, eating delicious food, and spending time with Quinn and his family, I have been figuring out a long strand of logistics whose ultimate effect on my trip is that I will be taking the next month of riding very slowly. The fact of the matter is, I happen to be a senior in high school with a relatively privileged upbringing in the United States of America, and as a member of this rather large but frustratingly exclusive group of people, I will likely have the opportunity to attend college. And with this opportunity comes a myriad of options and obligations.

Los Angelos

 Because I was in Ecuador this fall with extremely limited access to internet and no phone communication, I have come into the college search scene with the blanket fire approach. That is, I have spent hundreds of hours writing essays and applying to far more colleges than any sane person ought to do, and have thereby put myself into a bit of a conundrum. I have applied to twelve schools all across this continent and now I have to figure out how I can visit at least some of these places. This biking expedition is helping a little, for I have already visited UC Berkeley and I will be visiting Prescott College in two weeks, but unfortunately, many of the institutions I would like to visit don't come into close enough proximity to my route for me to reach them by bike. 

Flights :(

Thus, I will have to do more air travel which I am extremely unhappy about because I was hoping to burn more calories than fossil fuels on this trip, but it does seem to be an important step in the decision process. And I'm going to need all the help I can get. Seriously. I still haven't heard back from about half the colleges I applied to, so as the decisions roll in, my options will likely diminish, and when the financial aid packages come, the remaining options will most assuredly plummet, for my resources are limited and my commitment to minimal debt is irrevocable. But even so, I will probably have a few schools to consider that I have yet to visit and this will effect my biking plans.

 At the moment, the only college visiting plans that I have set are to visit Prescott College on my way to Phoenix (by bike!) and to fly to Vancouver, British Columbia to attend an admitted students weekend at Quest University in Squamish on April 3-6. The flight is out of Phoenix which gives me a solid week and a half to go the 100 miles or so from Prescott to Phoenix. If I am accepted to Colorado College and University of Chicago, I will try to figure out a way to visit those schools in the lull.Of course, my funds are limited, but Quest University offers a travel grant which helps a lot, and we'll see what happens with the other schools. 

Guess I'm probably going down that Street soon. 

But I diverge, the purpose of this trip is not, of course, to visit colleges, but rather to see the country from the seat of my bicycle, challenge myself, meet new people, raise money for Kroka Expeditions, and have an adventure. From now until El Paso, Texas, the adventure will be a solitary one, for Quinn has decided that he needs to remain at home for the rest of the spring. I am sorry to see him go, for it was awesome to have his companionship on the journey from San Francisco to San Luis Obispo and he is a good friend. This past week has been phenomenal, for having a place to rest and plan from has allowed me to recover.

However, travelling alone creates a certain atmosphere which leaves room to discover things along the way that would have been missed had you been travelling with other people. What's more, it will give me the chance to contemplate my life and the world as my legs carry me across the next thousand miles or of this country. 

I have a long road ahead of me...

Love, peace and healing knees,

Sonya 

A little bit of everything...

There is no one word, phrase, or even feeling I can use to describe this week. It has been a roller coaster of extremes in mood, luck and conditions, but one thing is for certain, I love bicycle touring!

Dinner from our hosts in San Francisco! 

My fully loaded bike, ready for touring

Stairs up from the BART

Our adventure began perfectly. I met Quinn, my friend from the Ecuador semester, in Berkeley on Sunday, and we stayed with relatives of one of my teachers in San Francisco. They treated us to an amazing meal, tour of the town, ice cream, showers, and cozy beds, not to mention overflowing kindness and hospitality. Their home is across the street from the Golden Gate State Park, the exact location of the beginning of our route. It couldn't have been a better way to begin our travels, and though I did leave my phone at the post office the morning that we left, there were no great disasters our first day.

In fact, we made it thirty five or so miles South, just past Half Moon Bay, with no trouble at all. We found a secluded area off of Highway 1 to set up camp in, and made a delicious dinner and even had an hour or so to hang out before squishing ourselves into the tiny tent I brought. Sleeping two people in a one-person tent doesn't work particularly well. Only one person can lie flat on their back, and every time some one moves, the other gets woken up. But we managed to get some sleep.

Stealth camping...sshhh

By 7:00 the next morning, we were back on the road. We biked a few miles before pulling off to cook breakfast, oatmeal of course. But even the most boring pot of oatmeal tastes exotic if you are watching the first rays of sunshine glide slowly inland across the foam capped waves, golden beaches and impressive cliffs of the California coast. By the bottom of the oatmeal pot, the light hit us, and we got back on our bikes. It rained some that day, and we got our first taste of what headwinds feel like, but given our early start, we were able to take a relaxed pace to Santa Cruz. We even stopped for lunch and I cooked up some chipotle-butter-noodles - delicious.

Tuesday night, we stayed with a friend of my mother's just outside of Santa Cruz. We were welcomed into their home and gratefully spent the night in warm beds. It was raining when we left the next morning, but it was a great day nonetheless. I am admittedly a bit too fond of bad weather in most people's opinions, but hear me out. If you start your day knowing that by the end of it, you are going to be hella wet and tired, possibly sore, hungry and frustrated, and maybe even miserable, then there's only one thing to do: enjoy it, laugh at it, have fun! Don't be miserable, because ultimately, the only thing making you miserable is yourself. Yeah, the rain might be driving into your eyes, and pelting, hard as hail, into your tired legs as you struggle to turn the pedals against the wind, but who's to say that if you're cold, wet and tired, you have to miserable? And besides, the rain is absolutely necessary in this area.

We had a wet, rainy day from Santa Cruz to Carmel, but we were blessed to be able to stay with a young man and his mother from Warm Showers who were superb guests. I called the guy at noon as we sat in the shelter of a supermarket, stuffing down Skippy peanut butter, bread and Monterey Jack cheese and watching the rain. He immediately offered us a place to stay. When we arrived at 6:00 that evening, his mother gave us hot chicken soup and rice and we both took hot showers and washed and dried all our dirty, wet clothes. After a wonderful evening talking with the guy's mother, we slept long and deep and woke to a beautiful day.

Big Sur coast 

We were hoping to see the Monterey Bay Aquarium, but the weather was just too good to spend any amount of time indoors, so we set off from Carmel towards Big Sur. The area is stunning, waves crashing wildly into the jagged coastline and stirring up a white froth that seethes against the rocks. The sea turns from a deep blue to turquoise in the turmoil; not the Turquoise #153 you paint the baby room with, but a vibrant, living color no painter's pallet can emulate.

Quinn, my travelling companion.

All day, we biked through the sun and beauty. We stopped several times to watch the ocean, snack, and enjoy the ride, so it took us over four hours to bike 26.2 miles from Carmel to Big Sur, the same amount of time it took me to run a marathon last spring. But our slow pace is wonderful. As I get stronger, my days will probably lengthen and thirty to fifty miles a day won't seem like much, but for now, it is a good pace. It gives us time to enjoy the ride and allows our bodies to recover each evening.

Well, at least most evenings. Thursday was definitely not one of those evenings though. We actually set up camp early that day, ate dinner and everything, but at around nine o'clock, we decided to pack up and find a different place to stay. We were a little sketched out by the campground we were staying in, so we took down the tent, packed up our bags and biked a mile or so down the road and set up again.

I made the brilliant decision of trying to set up the tent with only the rain fly so that we could have more space. It worked wonderfully, that is, until the rain started. By midnight, rain was splattering our exposed feet and the wind was howling, nearly tearing down the tent. Luckily, the spot we'd found on the side of the road was much more protected than where our tent was set up a few hours earlier, but even with the extra tree cover, the night was brutal and most of our stuff was wet by morning.

A fresh snack from the market!

The next day, the weather only worsened. We biked eight miles to a tiny town consisting of a general store and an inn. Quinn's spirits weren't exactly high after the previous night's ordeal, so we sat around in the store for a while. The highway patrol officer and just about everyone else who came through was quick to tell us to hunker down for the day and wait out the storm, so when the girl who worked there offered to put us up for the night, we agreed to meet her at 2:00 in the park a few miles down the road after she was off work. Like proper biking bums, we chilled in the bathrooms for a couple hours while we waited, kinda gross, but at least it was dry.

At around 1:00, we received word that we weren't going to be able to spend the night with the girl from the general store. The weather had started to clear anyway, but Quinn's back was still hurting, so he asked for a ride from a young couple from the Czech Republic who were driving down the coast. They agreed to take us. Yes that's right, they offered to take two wet, dirty bikers and all their gear into their little camper van and drive us fifty miles south to Cambria. And what did I do? I decided I was going to bike fifty miles starting at 1:15 in the afternoon through the heart of the worst storm the area had seen in a long time. Yeah, I guess I am one of those crazies.

I've always been the annoying person who wants to run an extra suicide in basketball practice, but this was different. I left as the rain hit again, and as I battled the fierce headwinds, I howled with delight. I could feel the storm's power as it surged across the ocean and crashed against my pitiful little bike, and despite the fact that I was going against the storm, we were one; the rain that fell in sheets, obscuring the road in brief instances, the wind that nearly knocked me off my bike, and the ocean writhing joyfully below. The roads were no better, hilly and covered in rocks from the small avalanches that tumbled down the cliffs to my left every so often. But the thumbs ups and incredulous smiles from the folks that passed me kept me going.

It was an eight mile ride to Gorda, and I was sure I would need to set up camp there and bike on to meet Quinn the next morning. But the weather slowly made it's way north, passing me on it's way down the coast, and every time I thought I had to stop for sure, the sunshine in the distance baited me onward.

By five o'clock, I had caught up with the sunset, and biked along the beach listening to the sound of barking elephant seals and watching the baby seals galumph along the sand. There was even a rainbow, and though I still had twelve miles to go to get to Cambria, I was beginning to believe I might be able to make it. My knees were in agony and I was bone tired, but the riding was flat and there was a good shoulder.

The Sea...

When I finally got back into cell service, I called Quinn, and he assured me that I was close. He had rented us a cheap hotel room for the night, and when I stumbled in at six thirty, the hot shower was heavenly. Needless to say, I slept well that night, but when I rose the next morning, things weren't looking too great. My knees were still in shambles, and when I headed out to go to the library, I cringed with pain at every turn off the pedal. The thirteen miles from the hotel to the library in Cayucos should have been the easiest day of the week, but my aching knees wouldn't let me do anything more than a crawl in the lowest gears. Our amazing Warm Showers host kindly picked me up in Cayucos though, so that I could give my knees a break.

I haven't biked since. I'm taking a break, stretching, resting, and doing my best to heal, because I know I will never bike all the way home if I don't take care of myself. I also happen to have a nasty case of poison oak which is extremely hard to treat while camping and biking, so I look forward to healing from that as well. The battle in the storm was well worth the sadness of taking a train to LA with Quinn so I can rest up for a few days. It's a hard choice, but one I know I won't regret.

So as I sit here on the train, watching the miles pass by that I was supposed to be biking, all I can say is that I want to keep going. This rest is necessary, as little as I like to admit it, but all in all, I do feel prepared to continue with this lifestyle for the next three months. It is a beautiful one, rife with challenge and adventure, and it is just what I need at this point in my life. As I have already discovered, I won't fulfill all of my goals, but I will learn, grow and strengthen as the journey continues. And with your help, so too will the scholarship fund for Kroka Expeditions! I have enjoyed telling people about the program, and I hope this trip can help spread the word and generate support so that more young people can experience the beauty of expedition.