The Last of Point Reyes; the City by the Bay

We are alive. We are well.  Sorry its been much too long since we last left you all a line.  The fantastic scenery of these pictures in Point Reyes hides one very insidious truth about the place:  its steep.  Very, very steep.  You basically have to cross over a small mountain range in order to get to the ocean.  We crossed this mountain range on five different occasions.  There is a part on the Limnatour Road where you see a sign with a truck going down hill and a quantifiable number to describe the hill: 17%.  All too often it is difficult to describe quantifiable things, but I can say with definite certainty that 17% simply means: get off the bike and push the damn thing.  It was all worth it.  I couldn't help but feel that this was a place for both weddings and ash spreading ceremonies, a place so unique it covered the entire spectrum between our dreams of life and our wishes in death.  And all this not but thirty miles north of San Francisco.  Birds of prey spinning elipses in the afternoon wind, trukey vultures and hawks, the deer native to this one place.  We went out to see the tidepools in the early morning and sat on the precipice of cliffs in the fading light.  Oh California! All things bright and beautiful; this is not the stark beauty of Oregon, but something obvious and tangible.  "The California sun transforms," Brit said when we first crossed the line in our rental car, and although something as a esoteric as an invisible line cannot define a place, the glow about things certainly has a rosier tint as we push south.   Lupine and daffodils, purples, yellows and orange, the red-winged blackbird on the fence, the cows fat in the pasture.  This trip has been marked by times of active inquisition as we pedal through the grape vines north of Healdsburg, and also of quiet contemplation, watching the surf gradually wash away all of man's footprints.   We are running the spectrum.  On next to the Marin Headlands, a 30-minute ride out of San Francisco across the Golden Gate Bridge.   We stayed at the hostel and met a couple hitching down from Bellingham who put all sorts of crazy ideas of catching trains and sleeping in missions in my head.  We crossed the bridge in the morning, just us two and a thousand of our closest friends.  It was hectic to say the least.  Weaving in and out of Asian tourists, their cameras slung behind their backs, ducking under oustretched arms and avoiding the hard core commuting bikers who push their way through everyday.   The Golden Gate didn't look red at that point, it looked rusty.  We stopped at the In and Out Burger, grabbed some beers at Hooters and stashed our bikes near Fisherman's Warf.  The cable cars looked fun, but not $15 fun, and so we stretched our legs out in the constant ascent and descent of the Frisco grid.  Skipping down Lomard street (the windiest street in the US), marveling at how native Friscans can park their cars at impossible angles on treacherous hillsides, wondering how the city deals with any sort of frost and throwing out absurd guesses on real estate prices.  Then down to Chinatown where we didn't hear a lick of English for five blocks underneath the banner of lanterns and cheap trinkets.  We were finally lured into a tea shop for tea tasting, where we were immediately hypnotized into buying a quarter pound of Apple Oolong for $25 and a portable tea strainer for a bargain at $20.   He was a good salesman.  I lobbied Brit heard enough to find the City Lights bookstore, the place poet Lawrence Ferlenghetti founded where Ginsberg read Howl amidst Kerouac and Gary Snyder.   Its too appropriate that the place is now in the midst of nudie bars, two-story porns shops and the encroachment of all things free speech.  The Beat Museum nearby offered us a glimpse into all things beatnik, including Neal Cassady's jacket he wore while driving Kesey's Further bus, Kerouac's Underwood typewriter and pictures of naked Ginsberg.   I couldn't get enough of the place, but after a few beers and a Chinese restaurant where the food came up on pullies, we decided to test the bridge at dusk.  It was phenomenal.  We could stop and look down at the city draped in lights, the Transamerica building rising like a great pyramid over the murky black of the bay.  They close the bridge after nine because of the jumpers, and it lends a sort of mystique to the entire journey, the steeples rising ahead like steeples in Gotham, catching a solitary stranger giving you a weary eye.  We rode with our headlamps through the tunnel and snuck up on some grazing deer who froze not three feet away from us.   Brit had her first bad experience with a fellow hostel-goer in close quarters at night which she'll have to tell you about in person.