Marin Headlands Bike Camping

This camping trip we sat on for months as Paco is now running his own farm in Ventura and we're at the mercy of the weather and seasons for when he's got a free weekend. It's the style of trip that I've wanted to do for a long time -- primarily one that we could start and end with our bikes at my front door. Nevermind the fact that Steve had to fly in from Phoenix and Paco drive up from Southern California.

The overall stats of the trip were:

I borrowed heavily from Emily on bikepacking.com plus a lot of the discussion in the comments on her post to create this route. Except I modified it to be doable by 3 40-somethings with varying (yet universally not great) levels of fitness over 3 days instead of 2. The route is a classic North Bay loop that takes in the Golden Gate Bridge, the Marin Headlands, Pantoll Campground, Bolinas Ridge, Samuel P Taylor State Park, Fairfax, and even some nice residential bike infrastructure down to Larkspur.

Steve and Paco got to my place Thursday night and little Jonny was super excited to show off his little trains and cars to uncle Steve while Paco prepared some dinner of his classic spaghetti and chorizo. Unfortunately, he was so excited that he absolutely refused to fall asleep so I spent nearly the entire night trying to get him to sleep and not eating dinner and hanging out with the guys while they prep'ed their bikes after the trip to my place. When I did finally get him to sleep, I came out to the garage to watch Steve reassemble his bike from the flight and it was so much fun watching him work I completely forgot that I'd left my sleeping bag un-stuffed on the shelf to keep the down from compressing when I'd packed the rest of my bags way-too-far in advance.

Friday morning I made some of my world-renowned* cafe lattes for the boys and fried up some eggs and chinese sausage for brekky. I packed little Jonny up for daycare, and we set off to get the 9:30am BART from Fremont to the Embarcadero. Leaving the Embarcadero station, we popped into the Ferry Building for another coffee and some empanadas. Most of the ride along the embarcadero was nice if not uneventful. I had kind of imagined this fun, semi-touristy cruise near the piers but it was early on cloudy Friday so there weren't all that many people out and about and then when the bike path gets near the most-touristy parts near Fisherman's Wharf, you're diverted onto Beach St. where it's just a kind of standard grimy city street. Not great, not terrible.

After an easy several miles of town, we got into the Presidio where the tourists on bike paths was getting more dense as we funneled towards the Golden Gate Bridge. The bridge itself was pretty busy with pedestrians and cyclists. Before the trip, I was watching a lot of YouTube videos to do prep for which routes to take and so on. One video was a recent one from Sklar Bikes where they did some ride up to West Point Inn celebrating their PB&J frame -- or something like that.

The point being in the video he talks about their route took them to ride across the Golden Gate Bridge and he says something to the effect of "which always sounds more fun than it is". Kind of sums up our experience. Once you're on the bridge it's kind of just loud and crowded and windy, sort of takes away from the grandeur and beauty and etc. But it was worth it and we rode over and into the Marin Headlands.

Once you get into Marin, the area wastes no time sticking you straight into the climbs. Our route started on Conzelman Rd (which I will give credit for having an insanely nice bike lane) until breaking off after like a mile and a half to the Julian Trail up and over the first hill down to the Rodeo Valley. I got a nice snake bite flat almost immediately as we began to descend. This led to a slightly heated debate about tire pressures as we had nothing else to talk about as I swapped the tube with my spare. From there it's up Bobcat Trail for another 800ish feet climb to get another cruise downhill into the Tennessee Valley.

Tennessee Valley Trail takes you along the valley floor to connect with the Coastal Trail which was a pretty brutal but pretty fun climb up the last hill of the morning. At the top of the hill you get a nice view of Muir Beach and it's town. The coastline all around this part of California is incredibly rugged, raw, and beautiful because of it -- this was a nice spot to catch my breath and have a moment to appreciate why it was I was torturing myself to climb these hills on a loaded bike. For the 3rd time of the morning, after that peak it was downhill cruising until we got to the Pelican Inn for lunch.

I looked up the Pelican Inn because I was afraid we might be in too bad of shape to make it all the way to West Point Inn (my original goal for the first night before it got fully booked) or even Pantoll Campground. I was desperately searching for any other hotel or Inn that could at least be a fall back if we found ourselves completely trashed by this point and absolutely couldn't make it up another climb.

[Aside alert!] In 2010, I had some months between the end of a semester during my Masters at Arizona, and the start of a short stint in a research position in Xi'an Jiaotong University (China). I took those few months to hoof it around Europe and hook up with all those European grad students I'd met in school that said "hey you should visit if you're ever in [X]!". That trip eventually took me to see some people I'd known that (then) lived in Nottingham, in the UK. I spent maybe 3 nights there? Whatever it was, it was enough time to visit many of their neighborhood pubs and from that point on I'll never not stop wishing I lived somewhere that had any of those kinds of places to grab a pint with friends.

So anyway, I was pretty primed to like this Pelican Inn when I saw its photos on the google maps. It got penciled in as a most definite stop on the trip for a bitter and some bangers and mash. And pleasantly, as hungry as I was after the ride, I've never enjoyed a plate of British food more.

After lunch I made the ridiculous mistake of talking to a guy that asked how we deal with all the car traffic - and telling him that we hadn't run into any; that the whole route was either really nicely divided bike lanes or else car-free fire roads. So of course the next 5 miles was on unprotected PCH up hill with inexplicably raging drivers.

Following the stint on the PCH, it was a not-unpleasant non-stop climb for 10? 15? miles up to Pantoll Campground where we set up camp for the night. Nothing brutal enough to kill us but just hard enough we got to enjoy complaining about life decisions for another couple hours.

It was pretty funny when we were setting up camp and chattin about our last trip to Catalina Island. I was mindlessly filling up my sleeping pad and saying how much effort I put into making sure it was in good shape because sleeping on the cold, poky ground after a long ride is for sure the worst. Even as I was saying that, some part of the back of my mind was thinking, gee this used to fill up after only a couple of the inflat-o-bag presses. I look down and right next to the valve is a comically large tear in my pad.

It was only after the gratuitous amount of patch tape actually sealed the tear before I realized I my sleeping bag was still on the shelf back home. I didn't go full freak out because it was relatively warm night and I had some wool layers, figured that'd probably be enough.

It was not enough. A few hours after bed time, I was not feeling great when I gave up and went outside to take a leak and consider my situation. Bless Paco for hearing me a'stirrin and asking if I was ok. As I was most certainly not, he had enough sympathy to offer me his jacket to add another layer. It was a major game changer but even still, I could only use it to cover a half of me at a time so I'd alternate between keeping my upper and lower body covered through the night.

Can't wait to see what idiotic thing ruins my sleep in the next trip.

Morning at Pantoll Campground was a special kind of beautiful

Bolinas Ridge goes in and out of dry grass to lush fern-filled forests without pausing even a second to consider your feelings.

Sammy P

Firewood run

Dinner a couple miles down the road at Giaco's

On the ride back to camp, we picked up one of the most expensive 6-packs of beer you've ever seen. But it helped the firepit vibe ten-fold.

Sunday was designed as a cool down, assuming we'd be beat up by the first couple days. I got up early in spite of being slightly more comfortable now that my makeshift sleeping bag included Steve's jacket as added leg warmers. I had the place to myself so made some coffee and dug around to find some of the last embers to resurrect the fire and warm up with our last few logs.

I started packing up some of my stuff while everyone was still asleep and was met with some baffling situation with my panniers. The velcro flap (on outside pocket) didn't look as if it'd been disturbed at all. Moreover, inside the ziploc bag with my snacks wasn't nibbled or torn or anything - just like 95% empty. For some reason my initial thought was Steve got drunk and stole my chocolates and pistachios. Maybe that was even payment for lending me his jacket to sleep. But certainly it couldn't have been a critter because why would they have been so tidy??

When Steve was up, he asked if I'd heard the 'huge' animal outside our tents last night. He went on to say how he heard some rustling in the night and worked up the courage to peek out his tent and check. He didn't see anything at first, so crawled fully out of his tent because it sounded like it was coming straight for mine. Then he was met with the sight of a racoon perched on my saddle (probably on the fence post behind it??), it looked straight back at him and it slowly pulled his hand from my panniers and backed away into a hollow of a tree where a few more were waiting.

Clearly the raccoons also scared off whatever monstrous beast had been lurking into our camp.

When the whole crew was up, we skipped breakfast in camp and went back into Lagunitas for some pastries and snacks at Pump Espresso Bar. We killed enough time until we were sure after the quick jump down to Fairfax the Marin Museum of Bicycling (Mountain Bike Hall of Fame) would be open. I'll skip any description of this place because any cursory search on the interwebs will show how cool of a place this is. I forget the name of the guy giving a tour, but we jumped in pretty early to another group and got maybe 25% of the way through the displays before Paco was kvetching that it was getting late (it had only been a couple hours!) so we had to drag ourselves away to pop over to Gestalt Haus for lunch (beer).

I think Emily's post on bikepacking.com first mentioned Gestalt Haus. But then my dude running the Gravel Bike Californaia channel showed some more detail about how they're super pro-bike -- on top of being a german sausage and beer haven. There was obviously no compromise on stopping there for lunch. Fortunately, it was pretty crowded so it forced us to share a table with another couple that were on bikes too. They had ridden in from, I think, Manzanita(??). The guy was a retired airline pilot and the gal was... damn we shared too many pints with them, I forget. Long story short, we had a great time hanging out with some conversations tangentially touching on bikes and bike-based leisure activities as one does.

Since they were heading mostly in the same direction as us, they showed us the best route down to the ferry in Larkspur. We only temporarily lost them when Paco's stupid rear rack fell off again (or some other such nonsense that his stupid bike was doing by the end of the trip) and me and Steve stopped to wait for him to catch up, but we assumed the couple took off. Incredibly they had stopped a bit ahead to wait for us so they could make sure we got to the ferry port. All in all it really was a beautiful ride through town (compared to my fear of ending the trip with raging drivers and pathetic bike lanes) all the way to Larkspur.

The ferry back to SF's Ferry Building first passes San Quentin (seemed to be very exciting for Paco) before they crank up the engines and blast across the bay. We got another beer in the galley and were in very good moods by the time we disembarked and rambled back to the Embarcardero BART station. The Dodgers had just beat the Giants so the BART was at first jam packed, but it thinned out continuously as we approached Fremont station.

The very last section of riding was the mile-plus from BART back to my place which was entirely fueled by our excitement to get home (grab another beer) and get some hot pot dinner. Unfortunately it was too late to bring Jonny and Cindy so when we got home we all cleaned up, I gave little Jonny some kisses and let him know I missed him, then Cindy stayed with him while the boys packed to get stuffed with burning hot hot pot.

After a painful night of burning guts, the very last thing to cap the trip was some pastries and super, super sugary coffee for steve from 85 degrees.