BigH Rides Again - The Wild West Tour June 2014

Day 10 – Yosemite to San Francisco 200 miles

At the end of last nights soiree we were so 'relaxed' that we left a bowl of crisps out on the patio table. I was woken at 4 am by what sounded like a bunch of racoons continuing where we had left off. Clearing up the remaining debris of both parties was my first job of the morning.

Eaglerider Party

Racoon 4 am Afterparty (image from web)

A lovely clear but at 5,000 feet, cool morning. We rode back into Yosemite to do the valley floor loop and have a leisurely coffee at the Awahnee lodge hotel.

Coffee at the Awanhee

Dining Room

Reading Room

We then left the park climbing back over the north side of the valley. We saw the remains of the extensive forest fires of recent years before descending a fearsome series of hairpins to leave the cool wooded mountain highlands to enter ‘gold country’. This has two meanings. Firstly the climate of California is such that during the winter and spring a reasonable rainfall encourages meadow grass to grow to a height of two feet or so, but the dry summer quickly changes this to a beautiful rich blonde colour.

California Summer in Gold Country (web images)

The second meaning is more direct. We were passing through the north-south strip of land in which gold (washed out of the Sierra Motherlode and left in sediments) was found in the mid 1800s which sparked the California gold rush.

'There's gold in them there hills'

After a lunch at the ‘Riderz Diner’ in Oakdale we continued on through the Central Valley seeing the intensively irrigated soft fruit farmland.

As we joined the freeway routes to the Bay Area the traffic became more manic; the situation not helped by the sometimes bad state of the roads.

In a tightly bunched formation we passed through the Oakland bridge toll and approached San Francisco – the chill in the air off the sea doing little to dampen the excitement of a day off in this most intriguing US city.