Southward Bound

After a loud sleep beside the highway, we were up quite early to make our final break into Fresno. With 60 kms to go and rain looming on the horizon we wanted to make as much distance as possible before getting soaked. It was a wet ride through the misty farmland and suburbs as we approached the south west corner of the city, which is the rougher part of town. We found a grocery store, stocked up, and thankfully headed to our friends Cory and Theresa's house before noon with the rest of the day to get showered and dry, do laundry, catch-up on our blog and generally relax as we watched the rain pour down outside. Cory and Theresa came home that evening and we hit up their favourite Mexican place to catch up: we had last seen each other back in our UVic days when we climbed together. Since then they had gotten married, Cory had done a post-doc in Edmonton, and they had moved to Fresno where Cory is a tenure-track professor, while Theresa teaches and helps conduct research - but more importantly, they head to the mountains regularly to play, being only 2 hours from Yosemite and the high country. After another rest day, and a tiny bit of exploration of Fresno State University, we got to head to their climbing gym and work our underused arms. It was fun climbing again, but we sure felt weak! We left the next morning, en route to Yosemite, and thankful for the chance to relax and catch-up with old friends. Czytaj więcej

We don't like to retrace our steps if we can avoid it so decided to take the Ben Hur Road through the countryside south east of Mariposa to get back towards Fresno where we had started off a week before. The dry ranch lands dotted with big oak trees was a beautiful landscape and the road was very quiet, except for the regular passage of tarantulas that are migrating this time of year. The descent to Eastman Lake would have been a beauty if the road hadn't been composed of shoddy pothole patches that threatened to loosen our teeth and the bolts on our bikes. Czytaj więcej