Day 28: Redway to Standish-Hickey State Park

Day 28: Redway to Standish-Hickey State Park (near Leggett)

Miles: 28

What I rode by: blackberries, mint, Eel River watershed

Today was a lovely day. It was a short day because we wanted to camp just before Leggett (so we could tackle the famous Leggett Hill early in the morning). By the way, the summit of the Leggett Hill is the high point of the entire Pacific Coast Bike Route. Anyway, we lollygagged through the day through more redwoods.

One of the side roads that took us off Hwy 101 was filled with blackberry bushes and we ate a lot of blackberries. This was also the location of one of the most fragrant pee breaks of our whole trip. Kristen was peeing on the side of the road and commented that it smelled “nice”. She was peeing in a bed of mint! The only other fragrant place was, get ready for this, the outhouse at the hiker-biker campsite in Devil’s Lake State Park, OR. A maintenance worked came by early in the morning to clean it out and left it smelling like cinnamon.

We camped at Standish-Hickey State Park where we ran into about 20 other touring cyclists! They all started at different places and at different times but had all synced up over the previous couple of days. The park was also across the street of one of the best burger spots in California (the Peg House) and we went for a burger with about 10 other cyclists. It was fun and quite different being around such a crowd. Throughout Washington, we were usually the only touring cyclists at a campground. Throughout Oregon, we would be with one or two other groups but would only have short conversations with them. We all mostly kept to ourselves. Now, we were in a very welcoming group of people who knew each other a little bit. They even planned out dessert for the night: one group bought chocolate, one bought marshmallows, and a third bought graham crackers.

Wild blackberries!

Minty fresh!

I know it's blurry, but this is only half of them.