SF-SLO Tour, Day 1

The mission: to bicycle from San Francisco (okay, Half Moon Bay) to San Luis Obispo; 250 miles in 5 days. Along the way we would experience ups and downs, cold marine layers and glorious sunshine, small town coffee, and questionable fish and chips. But we made it! Read on to see how the journey unfolded...

Day 1: Half Moon Bay to Santa Cruz (route), 50 miles
Total time in the saddle: 4.5 hours
Elevation gain: 2400 feet

Getting there: From the beginning I knew that I wanted to start the first day a bit outside of San Francisco, both to reduce the mileage a bit and to avoid the particulary sketchy stretches of highway 1 around Devil's Slide (south of Pacifica). So after waking up early to catch BART into the city, I met up with kc and took Caltrain down the peninsula to Hillsdale. Caltrain is well-equipped to handle bicycles, so it's a great choice for cyclists. At Hillsdale, we loaded the bikes onto the SamTrans bus (route 294) and headed to Half Moon Bay. Naturally, a car accident slowed traffic on highway 92 to a crawl, so we didn't actually start riding until 11:30.

By the time we hit the road, the morning marine layer had cleared and we had fabulous weather the entire way to Santa Cruz. Along the way we stopped at several state beaches, including San Gregorio and Pebble Beach. This isn't the Pebble Beach famous for golf (that's later on day 3) but rather a small beach near Pescadero that features interesting rock formations and abundant tide pools.

After stopping at the roadside Gazo's Grill for lunch, we took some time to explore the terrain around Pigeon Point Lighthouse. Then it was on through Davenport to Santa Cruz. Outside of town we picked up a nice multi-use trail that took us by Natural Bridges park, which didn't really look like a natural bridge from our angle. Weird.


In Santa Cruz we had reserved a private room at the Carmelita Cottages hostel. This was my first foray into hostel accommodations, and I must say that I was impressed. The cottages were really quaint, perfectly situated within walking distance of both downtown and the boardwalk, and sharing a bathroom with a French (Swiss?) couple wasn't really all that bad.

We trolled the downtown stretch for a while before settling on Saturn Cafe for dinner. Although the window advertised "Burgers, Fries" etc. it turned out that the place was strictly vegetarian and vegan. I would say that their window advertising and menu really bury the lede on that, but the food was pretty decent all the same. After dinner we strolled down to the Santa Cruz Beach boardwalk and rode the "Tsunami" ride. A pretty good first day on the road.