Home in Humboldt

There is no race report to write, no wondrous riding tales...quite yet. Friday I headed down towards California, it took a couple days and an hour of wrong turns in Eugene, OR before finally getting home. The 48 hours since arriving have been a blur of family, eating, and family--with a trip to the tidepools thrown in for good measure. My new Orbea Opal has sat almost untouched except for the quick spin I headed out on Saturday when I first got here. (More about the bike later....but it is beautiful, and so nice!)Now, it is just before 6am, the other out of town family members (below is a photo of 6 of the 7 sisters!) are starting to trickle away, and I am slowly able to decipher the river, dunes and ocean outside my mom's house as the sun comes up on the other side of the house.

Today I'll get out on the bike for a 45 mile climb up and into Willow Creek, then a 10 minute flat ground spin to my dad's summer cabin. I've been looking forward to this ride, I've driven this road so many times growing up and can't wait to see it from a bike, the view is always so different.It is beautiful here. No matter where I go, I've never seen anywhere quite like Humboldt. The forests are unkempt, the beaches stretch on for miles without clouds of tourists. Yesterday, riding around with my dad I realized that things grow here: parked tractors and trailers quickly become trellis for climbing vines, tall grass rushes to cover the immodesty of such a large industrial machine; above-ground waterlines become hard to follow through the thick low lying grass, guarded by sharp thistles.

There is no way to actually end this post. It is impossible to capture everything that this place has to offer with words. I could ramble with descriptions of everything I see. So I'll leave it here, with the photo from the window where I sit.