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It’s getting harder to write these.  So much going on and running together that I forget.  Also, there was a lot of partying in the hiker/biker camp ground last night so I never got anything down.

The day started out with disappointment that led to a major serendipity.  I start mornings in camp with a couple packages of the previously mentioned Tangy Lemon Chick’n oats.  Hot food is just necessary in a cold camp.  After that, I set my sights on another hot breakfast and some hot coffee at a town an acceptable interval down the road.  This morning, though, all the towns on the Avenue of the Giants that I looked at seemed to be abandoned or had their diners closed.  Finally, at a much later time than I had hoped, I rolled into a town called Garberville.  Never heard of it.  My guidebook said to take the second Garberville exit, not the first, which had freeway signs clearly indicating that food was available.  I heeded and took the second exit.  Immediately, I thought I was fucked– I couldn’t see anything.  Going back to the first exit was not an appealing option because it would require a second climb of a big hill.  I wasn’t expecting much.  Probably my usual boonie town dry toast and potatoes.  I roll the quarter mile into the business district and holy shit– the hippies come through again!  A hippy oasis–natural food co-op, a bunch of little restaurants, hemp clothing shops, and a bunch of outdoor-oriented sporting goods stores, and importantly, a lot of organic gardening supply.

I pull up to my diner of choice and find like 5 different (organic) tofu scramble options on the menu posted outside.  I stash the beast (I’m kind of calling her “the beast Rocincante” – probably a cliche, but this is a quixotic journey) and go in.  This is late morning, around 11 and the cafe is full of attractive young people who can afford to be hanging out in a restaurant and paying at this time of day.  They mostly seem to know each other.  There is no university for miles around.  What the hell is going on?  It is Humboldt County, so I have my suspicion but I was thinking that was kind of cliche.  Well it wasn’t.  I talked to someone later on and it turns out that the residents of Garberville are mostly “farmers.”  Yep.  Cool, cool town.  And the food was excellent.  I ate here:

That kind of qualifies as a sign, but I found a better one:

’nuff said.

Apparently, I didn’t take any other pictures.  As I recall, it was pretty basic riding all day.  Not too many annoying hills or anything like that.  The camp ground was in a nice spot with a cool grocery store across the street.  I met my neighbor in the hiker/biker camp over there.  He had dinged his knee while riding down to Oakland and the woman who runs the store was putting him to work in her garden while he recovered.  He turned me on to a nice yellow squash.  I chopped it up and cooked like soup it with some salsa and sriracha sauce.  Best dinner I’ve had in camp so far.  Totally blew away the weird Asian sweet potato threads– that stuff is bizarrely viscous and hard as fuck to clean off my cookware.  Gotta finish them though.

I washed my clothes in the camp sink with Dr. Bronners and hung them to dry/attempted to dry them more over a fire.  It was totally nice to finally have a decent fire, too.  The whole washing and drying thing didn’t work out so well, which is one of the reasons that I am checked in to a hotel right now.  More on that in the next post.

After dinner, I was introduced to the other longer term residents of the area.  Mostly a localish couple (Arcata?) who’d been hanging out a couple days.  They had a really festive picnic table in front of their fire– Virgin Mary candles, some cool beer can sculptures, and best of all, a really well-carved jack ‘o lantern named Jack O. Lantern.  Everybody brought something to the party.  They had something called cheese (which was incredible) and something called pineappple (which was also really good).  I brought some stuff that I had and my dehydrated fruit.  The Thai chili papaya was too much for them but the bag of pineapple (different kind, mine was sweet and concentrated, theirs was just concentrated) was quickly destroyed.  Fun times.  I guess the campground had been jumping all week.  Lots of south bound bikers and a group of Earth First!ers that I’m bummed that I missed.  I am in some kind of vacuum zone– I’ve seen two north bound tourers but no south bound all week.  I crashed with my smoky smelling clothes around 10.

Here’s the track (missed some miles in the a.m. again so it doesn’t really line up):