I’d been looking forward to this since the start of the trip – seeing a bunch of my friends from back home, our luxurious Airbnb’s reserved nearly a year ago. The eclipse derailed our Oregon Coastal hiking, but was one of the coolest parts of this summers’ travel so far.
Views from hiker/biker camp during sunrise and short hike at Cape Lookout State Park.
Airbnb luxuries.
Made some bread, for the first time ever. It turned out pretty well, was not a complete failure, and I’m going to make it to excess now. Really missed the kitchen during while long distance hiking – every meal is either in the Jetboil or eating out.
Actually pretty surprised at my phones ability to capture this moment. We enjoyed it from a hot tub, sipping on mimosas. Pretty cool to feel the temp drop a good 20 degrees and a brief bit of darkness.
So we’ve been off trail and in Morro Bay/San Francisco now for more days than I can count – thanks to Sara’s friend for a place to stay, we could easily stay here even longer. The food is too good, especially with the added hiker hunger. But the trail is calling and we’ve been itching to get back to the hiking and out of the big city.
We’ve been vigilantly scouring Facebook, Instagram, WhiteBlaze, and messaging friends on the trail to consider our next move. While the snow seems like a challenge we can deal with, the rivers are getting more and more dangerous and unpredictable day by day. After hearing about many people bailing, skipping ahead, or just having miserable times, we’ve decided to skip ahead about 390 miles, to South Lake Tahoe (by the time this posts, we’ll be on the trail in that section). We’re gonna bring some of our snow gear, but get to (thankfully!) leave our bear canisters for now and use Ursack’s instead. The plan is to come back and finish the Sierra’s in the late season – as an added bonus we’ll hopefully skip the mosquitos. This has not been an an easy decision, but my gut is telling me its the right call. No sense in taking on too much unecessary risk, the only benefit would be to my own ego.
With that said, we’ve been keeping active here and haven’t fallen completely into binging on luxuries. Sara’s parents flew in from Michigan for a few days and teamed up with us for some microadventures. Over the past couple weeks we’ve tackled:
Morro Bay/Morro Rock
Alcatraz Island
Muir Woods National Monument
Baby fox!
Muir Beach
Sutro Baths
Coit Tower
Golden Gate Bridge walk
Golden Gate Park – Tea Garden, Botanical Gardens
Rosie the Riveter WWII Homefront NP
Various section hikes of the San Francisco Bay Trail
Anchor Steam Brewing Tour
Dogpatch Boulders
And so on. I tried to only list the things that involved being active, the food could probably use it’s own post. But since this is more or less an adventure/hiking blog, I’ll just give one special mention to Bellota where I had my birthday dinner – damn good paella!
Of course we also spent quite a bit of time preparing for and figuring out this next stretch of our trip. We probably went to REI or Sports Basement every other day. We cleaned our gear while catching up on some Netflix. I even got a hair cut!
Thanks again to Danielle and Lu for hosting and providing us with a place to stay!
Expect our next blog post to be in a week or two from Quincy, CA.
Southpaw Hikes 