First, things on the home front have been great, I am relaxing and taking advantage of summer break. As a student again I have come to realize that the lifestyle I want is perfectly embodied by the schedule of a college professor. Lucky for me I am on the right road, anyway lets get to the point here, which is of course the torture of Capes and Inland Routes!
To start a cape is defined as a piece of land jutting into the sea or some other large body of water, which I always believed to be true until this trip. What we found was every cape we encountered turned out to be a mountain of a hill. A better definition would be massive amounts of upwardly angled land that jut so far into the ocean one would rather struggle to climb over it rather than go around it. Truth is struggling over these steep hills on an 80 pound touring bike was a touch more difficult than cruising them in ones auto. These capes ventured inland of course instead of following the seaboard which leads to the second dreadful sight on a map, the inland route.Inland routes are the simple occurrence where the route leaves the cool temperate climate of the marine layer, and turn inland, in our case, east. As soon as you leave the coast temperatures soar and can be over 40 degrees hotter than just a few miles back, we of course were tortured by these heat waves being especially used to the ocean breeze. At one point in southern California my thermometer read 22 degrees, which is actually 122 degrees, however my thermometer was not built to travel to hell and back so there were only 2 digits, where we obviously needed 3.
The point of this thought is that in planning this trip I would have never thought of these occurrences or the pain they would lead to, and although we made it over every cape and through every hot spell the inland heat could throw at us, next time we will take the coast, no matter how short the alternative route may look on the map!
