Biking the Pacific Coast – What’s there to worry about?

The Anxieties

After YEARS of planning (engineer brains – give us a break) our big Pacific Coast bike trip is less than a month away! For those of you that don’t know, come mid July Andrew and I will be embarking on an epic bike touring adventure along the Pacific Coast from the Canadian border down to the Mexican border. We’ve spent a lot of our lockdown time ‘virtually’ going through our route maps, and following along with Bill Thorness’s “Cycling the Pacific Coast” book. Being the nerds that we are, we’ve even been taking digital notes along the way in a Google spreadsheet that we’ll be able to access from the road. We’ve definitely put a lot more preparation into this trip than most tourers, but that’s just the kinds of people we are.

But alas, we can’t be prepared for everything, so while we are very excited and eager to embark on this adventure, here’s a list of all the random things nagging at the back of our minds that we’re actually anxious about. I wanted to write them all down so that after the trip is done we can (hopefully) see how silly we were to worry about such things. And I’m sure we’ll probably come up with some new things we should have thought about a little more thoroughly before beginning, but I think our list is already long enough, so I won’t worry about those unknown anxieties just yet.

1) Injury

My biggest fear is in the form of an injury. Drivers, pot holes, fatigue the dangers are numerous. Whether it be a physical accident or, as I am prone to get, an overuse injury. I am so paranoid that something will happen forcing us to stop our trip early. I only hope that if we do have to call it quits early we at least make it through Washington, or have some sort of ‘accomplishment’ to hang our hats on. (And of course that the injury isn’t too intrusive!)

Recently both Andrew and I have even been freaking out about injuring ourselves while training – before we even start!

2) Things Stolen

We will be carrying everything we need to live on our bike for 2-3 months. I’m already paranoid about bike/gear theft as it is when I barely carry anything! While we’re on tour it’ll be a whole new level of anxiety. Reading through blogs of other bike tourers it never seems to come up as an issue, so I hope they’re right, but it doesn’t mean it will keep those worry wrinkles off my forehead. Andrew did get me a fancy alarm lock for my birthday, so at least we’ll know immediately if we need to go chase someone down.

3) Bike Failures

Similar to the fear of an injury, I’m nervous we’re gonna have some random thing break that is crucial to the functionality of the tandem. The only thing I can think of to quell this fear is get an overhauled service before we go and hope for the best – which we did, and we will get our tandem back tuned up and refreshed on Monday – so fingers crossed!

After reading about other people’s touring set ups, Andrew told me he’s a little nervous about the quality of our bike for long distance riding (Bike Friday Tandem Two’sday). But as a non-bike techy I tell him he’s silly for falling into the ‘consumerist trap’ and that we’ll be fine, our bike has character. Hopefully I’m right!

4) Non-Riding Transportation

I love riding our tandem for so many reasons, but the bad thing about the tandem is it’s size. Meaning trains and ferries may pose a problem, and if we need a lift into town for whatever reason our options are limited. Most modes of transportation have a system in place for transporting standard bikes, but they balk at the non-standard bikes. We came up with a work around for the train transport at the start of our trip, so I think we’ll be okay on this anxiety, but the worry is still there!

5) Weather

I’m less scared about this one than I probably should be given our track record of bad weather days on our previous shorter trips. Although we are both pretty nervous about a crazy forest fire affecting our ride. We chose our Pacific Coast trip dates solely based around weather (seriously we made a chart analyzing rain, temperature high and lows, and general fire season), and unlike the Midwest, the weather along the coast seems to be pretty consistent. We have lots of time fluff built into our trip, so I’m hoping we can sit out any bad weather days. That means we’ll just have to pray for no major natural disasters.

6) Our Moods

So Andrew and I have always been fine in each other’s company and after working from home next to each other through the COVID-19 pandemic, I truly think being on a bike together for 2-3 months will be a breeze. (How we get along is one of the most frequent things people ask us when they hear we ride a tandem. Supposedly a tandem will make or break your relationship). We are a little concerned about how our moods will be affected when our sleep quality is dramatically decreased. And I’m always worried about Andrew’s bouts of hangriness, so I will have to make sure to keep him fueled up. Not to mention both of us are heavy ‘planners’ so this laissez-faire / figure-it-out-as-we-go trip hopefully won’t prove to be too stressful for us.

And back to the bike, I’m worried about numerous breakages in a row really negatively affecting our moral. Nothing ruins a lovely ride like having to stop for another flat tire.

Finally what will we do when we run out of things to talk about? Being the introvert that he is, Andrew will be fine – I do most of the talking for the two of us anyways, but hopefully I don’t annoy him with too much repeated chatter.

7) All Things Covid-19 Related

Finally, there’s this whole pandemic thing that’s not quite over. I was so relieved when we were able to schedule our vaccines well before our departure date. But I know the world isn’t out of the fire yet with this pandemic. With Canada lagging the U.S. on vaccine rollout the border is still closed (current extension until July 21, 2021) which put a wrench in our starting location, but at least that’s something we could plan for ahead of time. What we won’t know until we get out is how easy restaurants and accommodations will be. A lot of parks still have restrooms closed, and more concerningly, water shut off. I’m hopeful with the widespread vaccination rollout, most places will be itching to open back up, especially along the touristy coast, but that’s assuming there aren’t any variants or other uncertainties ruining our fun. We’re so happy to be protected ourselves, it’s one less thing to worry about, but we’ll still be mindful of others in an attempt to keep everyone safe, and hopefully we’ll make it through this crazy pandemic soon.

Surprisingly enough we aren’t really to concerned about getting lost. For the most part it’s just make sure the ocean is to our right. And follow Highway 101 / 1, so pretty straight forward – and we’ll have our maps, Garmin, and phones with us if we get desperate. But it’s not like we’ll be in the wild, so there will at least be a road to follow. The concern is more a matter of how busy and how hilly are the roads that we end up on. There was a huge mudslide earlier this summer near Big Sur that wiped out a section of the highway that would have required a 3 day detour! Luckily they finished way ahead of schedule so that particular landslide won’t be an issue for us. But if we do end up needing to make up a new route around any other road closures, I’m confident in our navigation skills.

So now you guys know, we’re only a little crazy, we do still have lots of fears just like anyone else would, but here’s to hoping it all goes well and we’ll be reading this after our trip is done and laughing that those were the things we were most worried about.

Biking the Pacific Coast – What’s there to worry about?