San Francisco to San Diego was my first multi-day tour, and overall I’m very happy with how it went. I’ve done plenty of overnight bike tours to Half Moon Bay or Samuel P. Taylor, and I carried basically the same kit on the multi-day tour.
Here’s a breakdown of what went well and what I might do differently on my next tour. I’m really eager to do the northern section of this route (Seattle or Portland to San Francisco), perhaps next year.
I spent about two weeks of my sabbatical riding from San Francisco to San Diego (Jul 31- Aug 15). I got in the habit of posting end-of-day recaps to Facebook and Strava as I went, which really helped me reflect on what happened. I’m reposting all of them here as a mega-post.
Total distance: 622.9 miles
Total climbing: 24436 feet
Total riding time: 55.85 hours
Sunsets on the beach: whenever possible
I’ve come full-circle. My very first websites circa-2005 were built with a CMS (Joomla or WordPress). I started messing with custom themes and plugins (which is how I really learned to code) then drank deeply of the semantic web koolaid and started hand-coded everything in XHTML, CSS, and PHP. I migrated to a static site generator seeking simplicity and reduced hosting costs, and now, umbrant.com is again powered by a full-fledged CMS: WordPress.