Greg and Kitty
11/09/09
Manchester to Salt Point State Park (North of Fort Ross)
Day 24
46 miles
This morning we woke up, and our tent and sleeping gear was just clammy wet. Not exactly pleasant feeling. After 2-3 days of not drying our tent out in the mornings, enough cumulative moisture builds up that the tent becomes intolerable. So, this morning we tried to dry our sleeping bags and tent. The humidity doesn't drop enough to really dry anything until about 10 to 11o'clock . While we were waiting we entertained ourselves by trying to feed apple cores to the dairy cows. Long story short, we got a late start this morning, but at least we now have a dry tent.
We rode into Gualala (pronounced wah-la-la) to get some groceries and realized when we saw a gas station that we also needed stove fuel. We stopped and spent our $0.30 on gas and were about to head out when... an older man stopped us and wanted our picture. He thought "How ironic seeing bicycles pull up in the gas line at a gas station." So we obliged and let him take our picture with a '50s vintage Agfa medium format film camera. It had a billows on the lens and the whole shebang. Little did we know that by letting him take our picture, we would continue to talk to this man for an hour. Come to find out his name is Tom O'Brien and he considers himself one of the oldest hippies on Earth. Tom told us he was to the Haight Ashbury district what Thomas Jefferson was to the United States. Quite the self proclamation. When we said our good byes to Tom, I think we had heard a good outline of much of his life, and he is 65 years old.
Talking to people is just part of the journey, so even though we were way off schedule, we didn't mind so much. We had to stop for the night at Salt Point state park about 15 miles short of our planned destination. At least our campsite had another nice kitty cat that entertained us the evening. I tried to do a little coon hunting around the campsite, but they were fast and elusive this night. Damn creatures
Greg
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