The boys had set the tent up on their own the night before and had generally slept well. However, I had made the mistake of sleeping in the tent with them because of the my lingering fears stemming from the terrible rains we had had at Wildcat camp. The tent was so small, I had the worst time getting into the tent, fighting my claustrophobia and falling asleep.
Fortunately, I was well rested enough by the time we got up. I scared some crows away from the tent and then got the boys up but later let them nap a bit extra while I did some laundry at the campground offices. I also stopped by Olema’s only coffee shop before returning to the tent.
The boys had gotten up and dressed by then. They had even stuffed their sleeping bags a little. The camp was waking and I noticed the profound diversity of the people around me. It seemed everyone was speaking Korean, Japanese or Spanish. This was something I had noticed the night before but there was much more clarity about it as the day got brighter.
I was moving things around at this point and we went to the laundromat to get the rest of our stuff, charge our batteries and finish packing. Everyone was interested in my e-cargo bike. We left around 11:45am and went to the coffee shop for a snack.
After that we climbed Drake Blvd to Bolinas Ridge Trail on our way to Samuel P. Taylor Park. I am always daunted by this hill since the only two ways to visit the park from the west involve busy roads. However, the climb was easy enough with few cars and I attributed that to the fact that it was morning on a major holiday so all the traffic was headed out to the coast.
Unfortunately, the descent on the east side of Bolina Ridge was scary because the road is a little rough and the slope had us moving pretty fast. I rested my nerves at Tocaloma before we rode swiftly up The Cross Marin to campsite 62 - the hiker/biker overflow site. The boys set up a tent while I retrieved a site tag. On the way back to finish setting up the campsite, I saw quite a few cyclists in the designated hiker/biker also known as site one.
Once we were dine setting up, The three of us rushed off to the swimming hole adjacent to Inkwells Bridge. There were lots of ladies - some of whom I even got to talk to. I drank a beer and encouraged the boys to get in the deeper poot. One of them even got in a second time. Importantly, I discovered, much to my surprise, that the canyon has many fine examples of greenstone!
Once I had had my fill of the afternoon, the boys got on the back of the bike and we returned to the campsite to have dinner. The boys initially tried to find fun nearby in the campground but as we had kept bumping into a camper about my boys’ age, they went looking for and found him. We had seen him around the campground enough at that point that I was rather amused by it. His family goes to the campground every year.
While I was feeding the boys dinner a short while later we got to know a through biker from Seattle who had been assigned to our site. We chatted about cycling and life in the city as we wound down for the night. I have a general policy of feeding the boys on camping trips and simply telling them to go to sleep and they usually do so. However, on this night they kept distracting me because of the visitor who was pretty interesting.
Once the boys had settled down, I focused on cleaning up the site table while chatting with our site mate. Eventually we realized we both had friends in the same communities in Oregon and we looked at the map together. We discussed the Smith complex fire which had been raging only a few weeks previous and I told him an acquaintance had texted to say that the Smith complex had gotten rain.
This is an occasional series chronicling my life. This Notebook Analysis series is meant to be contemporaneous piece developed as an agglomeration of my notebook pages. In each of these posts I used my notes to develop my recent thoughts.
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