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So its been a really really long time since we updated the blog! We've travelled to another country and through three US states since I last wrote.
We spent just over a week in Vancouver at the Samesun hostel, our time there mainly consisted of socialising and drinking before we crossed the border into the US. We met some awesome people while in Vancouver, two English brothers who had moved there for a year to find some work, a crazy Mexican girl on a school exchange trip, a crazy English girl on a school exchange trip, a few Aussies, a Kiwi and a Californian html programmer whos training to be a cage fighter, whilst working from his laptop and travelling the globe. Van City was a fun place, except for the country night at a local club that we got talked into going to. If I ever hear the lyrics "she makes my tractor sexy" again I think im going to kill the nearest person wearing a cowboy hat.
We spent a lot of time wandering about the city, walking to the beach and around the forest. We also took the Seabus over to north Vancouver to explore the Lynn Valley. There an Indian Jones style suspension bridge over a gorge, a few waterfalls, but best of all theres a cliff that you can jump off into a 30ft pool. That was pretty cool, but bloody freezing! The Lynn river is fed by the snowmelt from the surrounding mountains and while that makes the river clean and clear it also means its cold, real cold, the sort of cold that when you jump in you get a brain freeze and your muscles tense up.
Sometime during our stay in Vancouver we decided that the next leg of our trip should be pedal powered. I can't remember whether the idea was the result of a session in the Samesun Beaver bar but at some point in Vancouver we decided that we were going to cycle down the coast of Oregon into California.
My Uncle David hooked us up with a place to stay in Seattle with some old friends that he knew from when he lived there. So we packed out bags, got on the bus and headed to Seattle, our first stop in the US. People had told me that getting into the US is a pretty strict affair but from my experience it was more difficult to get into Canada. The guy at the desk spent most of the time telling us about a great seconhand surf shop in Lincolin City. We were told before travelling to fill out an online visa vaiver for the US called an ESTA, this however appeared to be irrelevant to the border guards, they hadn't even heard of it. Instead we had to pay $5 to get a stamp that said we didnt need a visa. Money talks.
Our time in Seattle was mainly spent preparing for the impending bike ride, buying camping gear and reading blog after blog to see if it was actually possible and where to get bikes. Seattle was also the first and last time I used my British fake ID when we tried to get into a gig for The Shins. From Seattle we took another bus through the rest of Washington into the state of Oregon and into the coastal town of Newport.
Americans seem to have an unwillingness to walk anywhere, when we got off the bus and asked how far to the campsite we were told that it was too far to walk. With no other choice we put on our bags and headed down the road. Half an hour later we were at our destinantion! We set up camp here for three days while we got bikes sorted. After a look around local bike shops and pawn shops we decided to head to Walmart. (An old rusty chopper and a single gear road bike didn't seem like the sort of bikes we wanted to ride a few hundred miles on) I got a 10speed mountain bike for $70 while alex opted for the single gear, retro schwinn cruiser with cruising brakes for $100. When we told the old guy in the store what we planned to do he didnt hold out much hope for alex's bike, neither did I.
We set off the next day with our bags and skateboards strapped onto the backs of our bikes, and quickly realised that it was next to impossible to ride up hill with such a weight on the back wheels. We made it the 35 miles to the first campsite and were completely knackered, we hadn't really ridden bikes since we got our cars back in England. We now realised that this wasn't going to be easy.
The Oregon coastline is breathtakingly beautiful, high cliffs, forests and mountains. Not exactly ideal cycling terrain however and it was really hard going. We met another English guy that lived in San Jose, he was cycling Vancouver to Mexico with his friend driving from stop to stop as a sort of support crew. His mum and dad were also following him part of the way in their Airstream Caravan, along with their cat who we had to the help find after it escaped at one of the campsites.
We made it about 180miles in 4 days and then the weather closed in. It started raning, got really cold and the wind made going downhill like going uphill. We had allready realised that we weren't going to make it so San Francisco on the bikes and if we wanted to spend any time further down the coast we needed to catch a bus and this weather just made us think even more about ditching the bikes. By the time we got to the closest town to the campsite we had had enough. We managed to hitch a ride to the campsite, hoping that there was a log cabin availible as our tent was soaked from the night before. No such luck. We found ourselves standing by the side of the highway, with all our gear, in the pouring rain trying to get a lift to the next town. It was getting dark and looking pretty damn depressing when a lady in a pickup pulled over. She turned out to be another Brit, seems like we look after each other over here!
We spent the night in a cheap motel, when we woke up the weather wasn't looking any better. Alex had a flat front tire that hadn't been there the day before and my brakes were next to useless, add to that the fact that my bag holder was falling off it didn't look like we were going anywhere on the bikes. The motel owner took pity on us and bought the bikes for about half what we paid for them, we weren't complaining, i never want to see another bike again. From there we managed to hitch a lift with a guy in his beaten up old RV who was heading to San Francisco.
We left oregon and crossed into California, I was sort of expecting the clouds to clear away, the sun start shining and the temperature to rise by about 20degrees. The weather stayed in until about lunch time but it still wasn't the Californian weather i was expecting! We spent the night camping under the canopy of the giant redwood trees just south of Arcata before heading to San Francisco in the morning. We got up super early so we could skip out on paying for the campsite and headed south. The weather was clear and sunny, like i'd expected as we made out way through the valleys and forests of the mountains. We stopped off for a breakfast of Burgers, "the cornerstone of any nutritious breakfast".
When we got to San Francisco it was obvious that we hadn't learned from our other experiences of the trip. If you remeber, we didn't book a hostel in Montreal and found ourselves pretty stuffed, only getting out of it because we knew people that could help us out. So here we were in San Francisco, with no hostel booked and no contacts. We got on the internet and rang lots and lots of hostels, turns out friday night most hostels are fully booked! We managed to get some beds at the Adelaide hostel by Union Square, it was literally the last two beds in hostels in San Fran. The hostel turned out to have an awesome breakfast of toast, croissants, shortbread and bagels. Real value for money!
We did all the main tourist things in San Fran, even stretching the budget to go to Alcatraz. It not everyday that you get to go to such a historic place so we thought what the hell. It was a good job we went too as it was really really cool. The audio tour is really good, with ex convicts and guards guiding you around the prison and explaining what life was on both sides of the bars. The best and only island prison ive ever been to, but then i don't think there are that many in existance. If your ever in San Fran go to Alcatraz it's well worth the money.
The next leg of the trip was to LA.
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