Author: neil

When I had messaged Jayaram and Aparna via WarmShowers about spending a night at their place, Jayaram not only responded, but graciously offered the opportunity to spend a couple nights if we wanted to. Our immediate reaction was “nah, we expect to continue south, and don’t want to impose that much anyway”. But, perhaps as…

Rather than traversing the Golden Gate for the third time, we’d decided to continue our overall-southward journey by traversing the east side of San Francisco Bay. There are no camping options in this stretch, but since we were now in a geographic area where the number of not-currently-on-the-road bike tourists offering lodging at their homes…

Today it was finally time to end our Napa vacation. We’ve already had a few “vacations” on this trip, where we’ve stayed in one place for more than two nights, and kept the bike riding relatively low. But even when we stayed at the Howard Creek Ranch, or San Francisco, for five nights, I never…

The park’s website said they had a 2-night stay limit for hiker/bikers, but the ranger said 3 nights when I asked, so, with the ideal November weather in a beautiful place, let’s stay another night! Well, mornings were still foggy and wet, so we repeated the strategy of getting off the shaded hill and down…

Wine tasting! Or more-accurately, winery-viewing. With a bit of tasting thrown in. Our whole approach to Napa had very little to do with tasting/buying fancy-pants Napa wines (it’s hard for people paying $12/night for their Napa accomodations to have very fancy pants), and more just experiencing the feeling of being in a place with a…