A big western loop: day 1 & 2

I spent the last few months cramming to finish off the soccer stadium book, and I purposely stacked my first week of January with every annoying obligation I had (oil changes, teeth cleanings, etc) so the rest of my month was free. I planned the second week in January for another road trip, hoping to hit Southern California to see family and friends, and spend time riding a bike along Highway 1 all the way up to Big Sur, where a landslide has closed one of the most beautiful oceanfront roads on earth and reduced car traffic to almost zero, making for an epic ride.

As the dates grew closer it was clear I had to change plans due to the fires. I was born and raised in SoCal and the fires are so devastating I honestly don't know how everything and everyone is going to get back to normal from something so destructive. But I also know with climate in a weird place, anywhere that gets hot and windy from now on can turn into a tinderbox, even the Pacific Northwest. Thankfully, most of my family and friends are safe but things are still a bit touch and go.

Regroup, new plan

I had some book business to do in San Francisco so my first travel day still had to end up in the Bay Area. My ideas on where to go next were roughly: SF to Vegas, do a Jeep trail in the Red Rocks area north of Vegas, maybe head over to the Grand Canyon south entrance for some photos and seeing family in Flagstaff, then head up to Moab, Utah for a couple days of more Jeep trails, then home. So a giant ~2,500 mile loop of places in the west over the course of a week, mostly that I've been too, but with enough new experiences to keep it fun.

Doth protest too much?

I don't know what's going on in Southern Oregon, but there seems to be a moral panic around human trafficking so much so that every Oregon Department of Transportation freeway sign for a hundred miles was focused on making sure everyone knew that human trafficking was bad. Then I stopped in Grants Pass for an In-N-Out burger and there it is on my placemat again. I've seen this stuff in airports and I'm dubious, because they throw numbers as if millions of people are being taken hostage worldwide and I'm not sure that's the case. It feels like the kidnapping of kids panic of the 1980s that was largely overblown.

Look, no one likes exploitative situations of any kind, but seeing predominantly right-wing southern Oregon go overboard on this very specific issue makes me skeptical of their intentions. Right-wing issues usually revolve around boosting their power or their chance to make money, and I don't see why this issue among every other possible issue is the one that requires alerting drivers.

East Bay, best Bay

This is a quick travel tip for anyone heading to the Bay Area and it's been like this for the past decade or more and I don't know why, but the cheapest decent Bay Area hotels are in Berkeley's Marina area. It's kinda far from BART stations or any part of the neighboring cities so requires having a car, but perched on what I am pretty sure was their long-ago garbage dump is now a nice spit of land hanging out on the water. It's got a 3-mile waterfront loop trail and there are a couple hotels with amazing views for only $100-150 a night when anything in SF can easily run $200-500 on the same nights.

Waymos aplenty

On day 2, I had to criss-cross the city a couple times and I realized I haven't driven in downtown San Francisco since 2019, and I forgot there are so many Waymo driverless cars everywhere now (and other driverless car startups too).

I'm generally in support of them as an enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend kind of way, where I think it eliminates a crappy job driving people around but the cars are also very careful and attentive around pedestrians and cyclists, but when I was driving behind them, I found myself pissed off by them.

In the photo above, I'm waiting through several light changes, trying to make a right turn to eventually cross Market Street. I was in the one right turn lane when suddenly both Waymo cars ahead of me blocked the lane for a few minutes to pick up passengers (complete with a guy having trouble getting the door to open and getting inside). It backed up traffic so badly even another Waymo followed people making illegal right turns from the bus-only lane.

Again, I think the way Waymo cars operate are better, safer, and more courteous than human drivers, but it's wild they're beta testing this on public streets and it's kind of funny to see how human drivers interact with them, since they're so demure in how they move around, I spotted other drivers merging ahead of them or cutting them off constantly, knowing that a robot car would back down from interactions.

Clown bike at the bridge!

There's a kind of bike that goes by the name "minivelo" and I think they're big in Japan because they fit in small apartments but it's basically a small wheeled bike with good handling characteristics, but then a large frame so it rides kind of like a road bike or mountain bike for a normal-sized adult.

I spotted this bike brand Kyoot (cute!) in a few random YouTube videos of mountain bikers riding around their towns and instantly fell in love with it as a silly, but useful casual city bike. It's fairly cheap at only $1600, it has a full steel frame with good components and I love how the small size means it can fit inside my jeep's backseat easily, with no rack outside needed. So if you ever spot a 6'3" giant on a tiny bike, it's probably me.

I had a couple hours to kill before some meetings so I parked in the Presidio and took the minivelo out to ride down to the bridge, back up to the deck, across to the other side and took a gander at the Pacific Ocean. I had a great time riding for an hour and will bust this bike out constantly for random city excursions in the future.

I wasn't done with meetings until 3pm, and though it was only 8 more hours of driving to Las Vegas, I hit the road but decided to call it quits when I got tired and that was sometime around 10pm in Barstow, California, which is where my second day ended.

More photos and stories to come.