Day 5: Cooking shouldn't be this hard.
Woke up expecting sore legs this morning but to my surprise the legs were fine. What surprised me was my upper body and arms were sore. Not what I expecting from a few days cycling. Guess it was all the pushing of the bike up those hills 2 days ago.
Left Elma at 7.30 this morning. Decided to go with the easier route and make twin harbor my goal for the day. It took a while for the legs to warm up, but when they did, it was nice easy riding over easy rolling hills with nice wide hard shoulders and very little traffic. A nice days cycling.
Learned quite a bit on the road today too. For example, tortillas are much easier to carry around than bread. Peanut butter is going to be a theme of this trip. Is super calorie dense and goes well with tortillas.
Met my first 2 bike tourers on the road today too. The fist was on the road while I was taking a snack break. He was cycling by so stopped to say hello. He started in Canada and is heading to California. He is cycling much faster/further than me so don’t think I will see him again. The 2nd tourer I met was outside the state park that I would camp for the night. He is a 65 year old Spanish/USA gentleman called Iglesias (prob spelled wrong) who has being touring for over 13 years. He decided to go to a nearby campsite instead as it was cheaper. He is heading towards California too at roughly the same speed as me so I might see him again.
After 70kms, I self checked into the twin harbor hiker biker site. The setup of camp went well until I tried to make dinner. My stove would work for maybe 1 minute and then would cut out. This kept happening making cooking impossible. So I let it cool a little, disassembled and cleaned it as much as I could but to no avail. Eventually I replaced the jet nossle on it with a spare and that seemed to work.
So I could then make my Ramon noodles. Only for the first bite to send me running for the nearest water source, cursing and blinding. I like hot foods but these were from the debths of hell, stupid hot to the point of being inedible. I don’t understand how anyone would eat them. I mean I expect my arse to be sore from riding the bike, but not from eating ramon… So I had to throw them out.
Not to worry tho, as I have some bean curry in a tin so all good, right? Wrong. Of course I don’t have a tin opener. So I decided I would use my knife try to open the tin. I get half way to opening it but absolutely ruined my knife. Bits of the knife definitely ended up in the beans. So I had to throw out the beans and the knife.
At this point I was a little pissed off so decided to go to a steak house across the way and blow nearly 2 days budget on a $35 steak, which I just didn’t enjoy.
Is there a lesson here? I guess it would be don’t eat ramon from a packet and cook proper food. That is the lesson I am taking from this anyway.
