Just a few more days

Today I'm in Santa Barbera and I'm taking it easy. The wind is blowing hard North bound and it's too hard to fight all day so I'm breaking it up a bit. Coffee, computers and rock n' roll. Yesterday was a hard one also. I missed my turn off and wound up heading inland. I checked my map and saw that I could either backtrack 4 miles or just keep going, catch 101 and follow it back to the coast. It was only a 10 mile detour but it was horrendous. Inland is so much hotter than the coast. I knew that it would but it turned out to be more so than I understood. Plus, there is NOTHING out there. I was afraid that I was going to run out of water and then I hit 101. I immediately noticed the signs forbidding pedestrians and bikes. I didn't have much of a choice since to backtrack would have meant 40 miles at this point so I went for it anyway. Hair raising, tense, and awful. It was a major freeway with a cracked shoulder that had weeds growing all down it. It was only 11 miles but I hit three bridges that came around corners and had no shoulder. Just white lines and a concrete barrier. This was not a place where I could take the lane. I just I had to wait for an opening and sprint. I finally made it to my dirt plot of a camp spot around six p.m.