Here we are planting and playing music off the 89. We were on the thin margins of this dicey road for much of the day. Speed limit: 65mph, and a good stretch of it with no shoulder. It runs through some beautiful country and there were moments of low-traffic quiet — but we didn’t have much bandwidth to enjoy it with all the trucks and RVs sporadically barreling by. Ursa and I took turns hanging in the back and calling out to the other to get off the road: “semi coming!” We became wearily attuned to the sound of internal combustion engines: using our ears to discern if a vehicle was going to be passing too close. Rotating our head a bit gave us a better sense of the directionality of the cars and would reduce some of the wind noise. Still, we had a few serious close calls.
On the upside, these tough days have given Ursa and I a chance to exhibit a different kind of care for each other. A primal, survival-mode kind of care that we rarely have to show each other in daily life outside the bike trip. By the end of the day, the shoulder widens — we make it to Burney and breath a sigh of relief. Tomorrow, we ride into the Central Valley.
-Ale and Ursa
