West Coast 4 - A busy week over the Bridge and into America’s Garden

Timothy Bruce
Jun 23
2 min read

So the last time I wrote I had just rejoined the ride after a bout of illness. Now 350 or so miles later I finally have the chance to update y’all. 🤠

On the ride I am a chore team leader, and my team this week were responsive for dinners. The good news is that many churches welcome us and treat us to dinners so my team only needed to prepare 3 dinners this week which included jumbalaya and chilli. On the big ride this week of 95 miles, we only needed to reheat food from the previous day’s feast in San Francisco. To be honest, after a ride we are all pretty much exhausted, so to prepare and provide food after the ride is very demanding. Especially when you have 25+ ravenous individuals looking to replace the calories burnt on the ride. My team did a tremendous job, with David Johnson starring in the chef’s role!

So what were the highlights of this week, apart from preparing food??? Well… cycling over the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco was the first!

We met up just before the bridge and I had my photo taken in support of the two children’s charities - don’t forget to donate please.

The ride into San Francisco was to an Armenian church where they prepared a fantastic chicken curry - so good that we reheated it the following day too!! Fortunately it was a relatively short ride and we had plenty of time to explore with friends - Nick & Bobbie Mota and Dan & Cindy Hepp.

From San Francisco we then started off on the ‘big ride’ of the tour of 95 miles and over 5,500 feet of climbing to Watsonville from where we would do our only ‘Build Day’ of the tour. From Watsonville we were taken to Atwater and then we all volunteered into teams to undertake work. Mark Murphy, Pat Pritchard and I volunteered to erect some fencing at Diana’s house. The garden was very pretty and had fresh lemons and oranges growing there.

After the Build Day, we then set off riding through America’s Garden where 80% of the vegetables eaten by Americans are grown. The sheer scale of this is mind-boggling!! One of the first things we saw were fields of strawberries. I’m pretty sure Lennon and McCartney were not considering these when they wrote ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ but given that they stretch over acres and acres of land, the song immediately came to mind!!

Also this is a wine region and the regimental shape of the fruit orchards and vines is very impressive

Ever since Beth Erquhart joined the ride, her influence has been met with loads of smiles and fun, particularly at the rest stops along the way. Apparently my face was a picture when she met us in San Francisco!!