Day 3 - Half Moon Bay, CA to Angel Island, CA

Day Total - 48.5 miles
Trip Total - 140.4 miles

We had to catch the Angel Island Ferry in Tiburon at 3 PM. That decided everything else for the day.

We left Half Moon Bay at 7:30 AM, when it was still quite chilly to say the least. The first 10 miles were surprisingly quick - the northerly wind hqd died down and we made good time on the fairly flat road. But then we hit Devil's Slide. Caltrans is building a tunnel to bypass this section, and it's pretty terrifying in a car. On my bike, I got to the point where I no longer felt safe riding, with heavy traffic, a steep grade, and no shoulder. I got off and pushed, keeping the bike between the traffic and me. Finally, I reached the summit, and Kevin and I blasted down the hill into Pacifica at 40 mph. We made a much-needed grocery stop in town and continued on our way.

Just before the road got dangerous

In Pacifica, the ACA route (and the law, according to a well-concealed sign) takes bikers off Highway 1 onto sidestreets. It would be another two days until we got back on it. At first, the roads were flat and very pleasant, but not to worry, it wasn't long until we hit a steep climb on appropriately-named Skyline Drive. Another high-speed descent soon followed though, as we turned onto the Great Highway and into San Francisco.

For how difficult we thought San Francisco could be between the hills and the traffic, riding conditions turned out to be some of the best so far. The bike path along the Great Highway kept us out of traffic, and the ACA routing steered us around the worst of the hills. We reached the Golden Gate Bridge painlessly (relatively speaking) and on schedule.

The Bridge itself was not quite as nice. Yes, riding across it on a bike sounds good in theory, but when you have thousands of people renting bikes that they seem to have serious trouble riding, it is definitely an exercise in patience. Add in pedestrians who act like every bike is the first one they've ever seen, and we were both happy to get off the bridge and into Marin County.

Marin County must be what passes for cyclist paradise. With a well-signed network of bike routes going everywhere you would want to go and with bike paths seemingly everywhere, getting to Tiburon was amazingly easy. Sausalito was still crowded with tourists (and what must be the highest bike shop per capita ratio in the world), but once we left the center of town, it was smooth and fast riding to the ferry.

Angel Island and the ferry

We got to the ferry terminal around 2:30, in plenty of time for the 3:00 departure. We were, not surprisingly, the only non-employees on the ship for the 10 minute ride to Angel Island, where we had reserved a campsite. We still had to ride about a mile and a half from the dock, but that ride was utterly spectacular. The view from our campsite that night encompassed the Bay Bridge, the city of San Francisco with Alcatraz in the foreground, and the Golden Gate Bridge and the Marin Headlands to the west. If we hadn't been so tired, we may have stayed up all night taking it in.

Enjoy the photo dump:

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