Good Weather, Bad Traffic

 Before I get started on the past two days, let me show parts of the Lick Observatory ride.  These are screen snips from my route planning program called MyRoute: 

This is the part of the ride up to the Observatory

And this is only a small part of the road past the observatory.  The first time Jenny rode it was with her neighbor who rides a big BMW road bike and he hated it and swore he would never do it again.  A smaller, agile bike is a real advantage.  

So on to the two day ride up hwy 1:  Probably because the weather was so good, which is kind of rare on the north coast, there was a LOT of traffic in the first half of the ride.  After that it got much better.  I suspect a lot of people were doing a day drive from San Francisco, and once we got to the point where they had to turn around to get back home, traffic thinned out.  By the time we got to the super curvy part from the coast up to Leggett, it was all good.  This is the first time I rode it up and then turned around and rode it back, so it was about 44 miles of the good road.  We stayed overnight in Fort Bragg after a long day in the saddle, but only 280 miles.  The next day was back to Jenny's house and traffic again as we got close to SF.  California has some great motorcycle roads, but the price you have to pay in dealing with the traffic can make me have second thoughts about coming back.

I didn't take many pictures, but I have some of the standard ocean views: 

We took a side trip to Point Arena lighthouse. 

It was 200 miles from Ft Bragg back to Jen's, and I was pretty tired.  It was definitely the right choice to cancel the planned ride down south. I don't think I would have lasted very long in those 100+ degree temps.  In fact, the three days that we did ride was enough for me.  Maybe I'm getting old......well I know I am; I just had my 80th birthday.  But I want to Never Stop Riding. 

One last thing: We took the dog for a walk and saw this automatous car driving around the neighborhood.  It did have a person in it but I don't think he was doing any of the driving.  Sensors were spinning on the top and all kinds of other places.  A look at the future?