California: Tom’s Place to Walker | A North American Bicycle Journey

Day12

French Campground (near Tom’s Place)[MAP]

California28 May 28.63 miles 3:00 hours

Something ate my rice cakes last night as well as a healthy helping of my handlebar tape. Had my first few drops of rain today just after I left the campground. I quickly rode back to a shelter at the campground and waited out the rain, as well as covering up my guitar in a few extra layers of garbage bags.

Got to Bishop for the horse fair finally but the only campground in town is full.

I thought I could sweet talk them with my aussie accent, even with the “NO VACANCY” sign clearly on the counter, but no luck. On the other side of town I put up the “TIRED AUSSIE…” sign again, as I was coming to a climb of at least a thousand feet. Moments later, an old white pick-up stopped for me and whisked me to the Sherwin Summit (elevation 7000 feet). My second Sierra summit and the second one that I didn’t have to ride up. Thanks Cheryl and Jim.

Entrance of Big Pine campground with my first storm brewing over the Sierra Nevada mountain range (Day 12)

Day13

French Campground (near Tom’s Place)[MAP]

California29 May 7.96 miles 0:43 hours

When I got to camp yesterday I was befriended by a guy called Cecil, or “Whitey” as his friends call him and his German short-haired pointer, Molly. He’s 79 years old, has had heart attacks, bypasses and now has a pacemaker and still hikes and fishes around here in the hills. He’s been coming up here since he was twenty years old but “they didn’t have the fancy toilets here then”. He asked me if I have had any experience with bears and proceeds to tell me about a neighbouring tenter who had to shoo one away about two years ago.

“Ah, but you’re alright up here I think, you’re in the open a bit more. He was in the bush”.

Before starting this trip, it wasn’t the riding or the being out in the elements every day that worried me, it was the bears. I come from a country where most snakebites are potentially fatal, where you have to check under the toilet seat for poisonous red-back spiders, where kangaroos can beat the shit out of you and koalas can scratch your face off. But for me, none of this compares to a meeting with a bear. I tell Whitey I hope I never have a “bear experience”.