The Bike

Normally, for long touring trips you plan and build a very specific vehicle that both fits you and meets the requirements of the trip. As I do not yet have a bike out west, I ignored this requirement and instead bought a broken Faraday Porter sight unseen approximately 24 hours before the wedding. I really like these bikes and spent quite some time reverse engineering and learning about them [link]. The bike pickup went really well, the couple that had it were some amazing Greeks and alas the internal Faraday battery had failed, turning it into a normal, albeit heavy, bike.

Moments after purchasing the bike, I performed the ceremonial 'will it wake up' test, plugging a ~40V 10S battery into the charger port and summoning the bike gods to see if it would awaken. There is an undocumented feature of the Faraday's they were intended to eventually have an auxiliary battery, however it never ended up getting manufactured and the company went under. The feature however was baked into the bike's hardware! If we look at the charge port, you notice that its a standard 3 pin XLR. This is mechanically a wonderful connector as it's tolerant to musicians so clearly it can take some abuse. When the charger is connected the bike knows to shut down and accept power from a static charger, as both pin 1 and pin 2 are tied together as the negative side of the charger. In this mode it will sit with its rear red led circle spinning (while charging) or static (when fully charged). If there is no connection between pin 1 and pin 2, the bike can accept external power from a similar voltage battery. This is where things get murky, it appears that the external pack connection is diode connected to the internal pack. I imagine Faraday were expecting to also use an external 12S battery, but i have no idea how they intended to deal with pack-to-pack state of charge mismatch.

With the internal battery quite dead, it may as well be disconnected (its protection mosfets are open). Connecting an external battery effectively in parallel results in the bike just using that external battery. After plugging in a 10S battery (40V) the bike came to life! Its headlight turned on, the back brake indicator lit up and more importantly, when put into assist mode, it indeed assisted. In this mode of operation the bike is really limited. There's two flags set by the internal battery, and without them in a happy state, you're effectively in limp-home mode. You get 90W, which is significant but its nowhere near the 300W that i think the cycle normally outputs.

I cycled over to a bike shop in San Jose to buy a park tools chain tool, a new shimano 8-speed chain and a nice seat. The folks at [name of place] were fairly curious about this long adventure and did end up measuring the chain wear on the existing somewhat rusty chain, while it did pass the tool test I replaced it while I had the opportunity.

As it turned out, the seat was worth the price, the specific seat was a model [Link]

Day 0: Lick Observatory

This is not cycling related but by word Lick Observatory is gorgeous. While it has plenty of lore, its staff are amazing and the view is positively stellar. This as a wedding venue was a brilliant plan. While this is pre-cycle adventure the road up was absolutely wild, plenty of ledges and switchbacks with zero cell phone coverage.

Its wonderful seeing good people do great things. The weather worked out incredibly well.

The wedding was amazing and getting to dork around with the telescope afterwards was a real treat. Viewing through the eyepiece was really interesting, as the tracking mechanisms follow the target the user has to constantly move around on a ladder. Observing was done with the lights out as the staff told stories and answered questions. I was somewhat curious how everyone got to work, its a 1 hour drive up a wildly winding road and as it turns out some just live in the hills, while others volunteer and appear periodically.

When I got back to charge up everything for the coming day of cycling, i ran into my first road bump. The only USB-PD cable I had, failed. It's 10pm so this was a problem for another day. The only charging option I had was 2X 10W 5V USB outlets that were in the room, one recharged my portable travel power bank and the other somehow slow charged my laptop ~20% overnight at 5V. Determining that the USB PD cable had failed was annoying as it was difficult to discern if it was either a power bank or wall adapter issue. I did give a go asking the front desk if they had anything handy but there was no misc bin of cables unfortunately.

Day 1: San Jose to Marina California

Here's the rough route for day one, with the note that the bike has not yet been really stress tested, and there's a bit of mountain pass action on the route, so I started with a more conservative 75 mile attempt. My initial plot was to get all the way to Monterey, with a fallback of Marina Ca. The route intentionally tried to keep near civilization pockets, such that if things went south I could find a ride. Staying further in-land would have saved ~10 miles but put me on a really quiet stretch of road which I was not totally excited for yet.

I did attempt to travel light, so here's a quick view of what I'm carrying with me. Clothes and first-aid are kept in the backpack, along with lightweight items like undergarments, a set of non-cycling clothes and a spare set of cycling shorts. I really like the Klein carry bags [link], they are abuse tolerant and thick walled, so tools do not end up poking through the bag lining. The grey bag functioned as my bike-stuff container; consisting of repair tools, a spare tube, patch kit, small pump and a pile of zipties. The red bag held action cameras, camera gear, charging hardware, cables and mounts. The yellow phone is something new, its a spare cell phone on a different network provider that was intended to act as navigation. I had some logic here, having a spare communications link was pretty valuable if I got terribly off the beaten path. I kept my normal phone in my backpack or inside a zipper case on the bike, away from rain and dust. If the navigation phone fell off, got crushed or ended up in a ravine, I had my normal phone as a backup. I had this optimistic plan for editing videos and documenting en-route, so I brought along the laptop-in-envelope, a ~2017 Lenovo T470s, documented here: [link]

Speaking of gadgets, on the far left is a ~400W battery charger, capable of slamming 10A at 40V into the makeshift range extension battery. [link]. I really like this particular model, as it has a small display to indicate live charging details. While it does not show watt-hours or ampere-hours it gets you enough information to help estimate how things are going. Its mechanically somewhat large and likely would not enjoy rain, but it did work reliably.

I debated going for a cycling computer, or rather, something to display map routes, however without familiarity with a bike computer, or the desire to purchase a 400$ gadget, i opted for phone and google maps. In retrospect it may have been a bit better with a cycle computer, or something more cycle-friendly vs google maps. Looking back, having a better data-log of the cycling and cycle power would have been amazing, instead i opted for data-logging on my Garmin Watch which was not ideal for day-long adventures. This is a bit of a controversial take as technically the watch would be fine by itself. I found that one of the big issues was my frequent stops to look at the scenery, and the pause-resume would either time-out or I'd accidentally forget to restart.

Continuing with the load out, there's two 3D printed cases. One holds a Potensic Atom 1 Drone, and the other holds its matching remote. I love this lil drone and it did absolutely amazing on this trip. The 3D print files for the cases are available here [link]. The GoPro tripod was intended for some cycle-by shots, but it is both incredibly short and mechanically takes up a lot of volume.

With a Full night's recharge in a hotel, I jogged to a UPS, grabbed some boxes + packaging tape and mailed my suit, dress clothes and dress shoes to my final destination hotel in San Diego. I didn't need to chew up limited bike space with, a literal suit. I also cycled over to San Jose Microcenter to get an actual USB-PD capable cable rated for more watts as the one i did bring failed on the first night of the trip at 65W.

First stop was Santa Cruz. I had left my sunglasses and sunscreen somewhere and needed a resupply. As a reflective person this became a priority fairly quickly. I ended up at a touristy store and bought 22$ sunscreen and was pointed to a place with 'more budget friendly' sunglasses.

I stopped for lunch at Castelli’s Caffe & Deli, replenished my water supplies had coffee and found some road snacks. I did goof up here, I ordered a breakfast burrito but somehow only with potatoes. It was potatoes and sliced ham in a burrito. This was likely my own doing. While I was out of the sun I re-applied sunscreen for the rest of the day's adventure. While I was there, a vehicle that was halfway between a golf cart and a neighborhood electric vehicle rolled in, covered in LIFEPO4 logos. It's wild that I was able to work on that chemistry over a decade ago and it's just coming into its prime.

Continuing on I found an absurd amount of agriculture. We're talking ridiculous quantities of agriculture. The further I went the bigger the fields. I now get how isolated people may think the earth is flat, these fields stretched off into the horizon.

This was also the first drone-shot of the trip, I was still getting my wings under me and mostly avoiding power lines. The fields seriously continued for ages, and the small agriculture roads were relatively vacant, a pickup would appear every 10-15 minutes or so. Something that I was fiddling with was object tracking on the Potensic. It is a bit fiddly, as the moving subject must be visible to track and the drone does need to start with a 45 degree downwards shot. It does not seem to use the user's GPS positions to aide in tracking unfortunately and attempts a purely visual solve. I really wanted to also include the vistas in the distance so I was fighting with a loss of visual lock periodically.

Its very visible what gets watered and what does not. As a north-easterner, seeing a field getting tilled in September is weird. They appeared to be growing grape tomatoes on the left. The agricultural folks were all quite nice and waved at me from their pickups. The chest-mounted GoPro also held up admirably, with the not-quite-super-wide field of view you could see a the horizon and also the cycle peaking into frame. The contrast between bright sun and newly tilled soil is a lot to deal with and the footage seemed reasonable.

First route hiccup. The googs really wanted me to jump on the highway as technically a residential road didn't quite actually make its way across a rail line. In my desire to not cycle on the highway I opted to ignore this and just try and find a walking path, and lo, I found one and schlepped the heavy bike down and back up. Onto some fresh asphalt i continued the journey south.

By the end of the day I had made it to Marina CA, a somewhat small town but civilization nonetheless. So far I'd made it 96 miles total on day one, this was more than I had planned due to some mis-routing and detouring to find more cycle friendly roads. I did debate cycling further but the sun was starting to dip into the horizon and I needed to find a hotel and spend some time twiddling with the bike.

Cycling right into a hotel is great, I found a Marriott hotel and within 10 minutes I had a room with a shower. I've done plenty of cycling before but mostly in the northeast, and generally without copious amounts of sun block. I quickly learned that the sun lotion was great at accumulating trail dust and I was legitimately surprised by how incredibly dirty the shower runoff became. I found some expensive coin operated laundry and cleaned up my travel clothes, cooked some ramen in the microwaved and started recharging the gadgets.

My (data) plan was not foolproof

I had this great idea: capture footage by day and upload it to a file-server over ssh by evening, this way everything's backed up and I do not have to juggle micro-sd-cards which I will inevitably misplace. I'd tested before hand and could reliably write at a gigabit , or at least saturate a spicy network connection. As it turns out hotel upload is remarkably not spicy. I was finding 2 megabit upload, which even with an 8 hour overnight recharge, was insufficient to copy the days' footage over. I sent about 10 GB of data across the Aether overnight. I ended up using my little travel laptop, to store footage. My logic was pretty simple, maybe there was more bandwidth in the future and this hotel was just a fluke. Narrator Voice: It was not

With the tiny laptop trying desperately to send the day's footage up to the Aether, I spent some time fiddling with the bike, seeing if anything became loose and determining if I had the option to make it more responsive. While it was in a limited mode which seemed to peak at 90W, I wanted to see if I could adjust the controller's torque multiplier constants.

Day 01: Marriott Hotel rating: 😑
AC was tagged out and network was 90's, fortunately the shower was hot and bed was enormous.

Day 2: Marina California to Pismo Beach

Refueled with a full nights rest, a complementary breakfast and fully charged batteries (thanks to the new USB PD cable), it's off to the races. My adjustments to the Faraday made the bike slightly peppy-ier. The route today is a bit rough, way less civilization and way more hills.

The coastal highway unfortunately fell into the sea, I really wanted to explore Big Sur, but traveling to it would result in subsequently back-tracking. Here's just how much of Highway 1 was non existent at the time.

There isn't really a bypass route, as far as I could tell, even for a bike. I did try and discern if it was passable on bike as-is, but the concept of loosing a full day of cycling really pushed this route out. So in-land travel it is! There are a number of caveats of running inland, mostly temperature. It's ~10C hotter on highway 101 vs highway 1, which its a lot.

I set off and the roads switched from access roads to agricultural roads to packed gravel pretty quickly. It was early yet and I pedaled hard through intermittent fields of vegetation sprinkled across a desert landscape. The roads were incredibly empty, as it turns out being "off the beaten path" is quite excellent. Periodically I'd see these white school buses labeled as labor transport . They'd tow a trailer with 2-3 portable toilets and hand washing station. Folks busy picking things waived and i waived back. Tractor folk beeped at me happily if i made the "trucker horn" motion. I switched the body-camera GoPro to use the ultra-wide view and i think i like the footage even better than i expected.

I finally found a place to refill my water supplies in San Ardo. This corner store was great, I met Mr Byon (spelling?) and cooled off in the store while asking for directions. I mentioned I was previously in Boston and as it turned out they were planning on moving east soon to retire. They had run the store for 30 years, I met their son who's east coast based and learned some lore along with which areas were good to avoid nearby. I did also manage to add some electrons to the bike pack out by the water machine. I liked the Norman Rockwell aesthetic of the building, it looked like it may have been a cafe in earlier times.

Then everything goes off the rails

The route became increasingly remote, I routed through a different kind of farm, an OIL farm. I've never seen live derricks up close, they were the least lubricated machines I've ever witnessed. The climbs immediately switched to "four wheel drive bro truck" and i opted to walk my bike as i lacked a gear low enough to warrant such climbs, what are these roads?
Why are they listed as public roads on the map?
I periodically ascended hills only to descend and make up some of the lost time.

Over the course of three hours the roads turned into crushed gravel and then into straight up martian landscape. I was pushing what this city bike could do, with barely gravel tires and comically overladen back end it was getting increasingly more sketchy on the downhills. With a proper mountainbike this would have been a bit quicker of a climb but honestly the Faraday did wildly well.

And then you found civilization right?

No it got remote-er. The path to the next town, San Miguel, was through oil field service roads. I don't think the roads themselves get serviced. A number of these paths had large pipelines strewn about. It became remarkably dry.

As it turns out I was in the San Ardo Oil Field, which was the only real path to the next town, Bradley California, aside from cycling along highway 101, which is a last-resort activity. Despite the absurd amount of gravel cycling, and hill climbing, the views were amazing. I don't think I've ever really felt this remote.

Bradley California is very small

I finally made it out of the dull-drums and into the next town, time to replenish water, charge some batteries and take a breather. It appeared on the map that there was a convenience store, which is kind of the lifeline of these escapades, Chris kringle’s crackerjacks . Unfortunately it was closed, or it appeared closed. The library was also shut-down closed. There was no one driving about, it was really quiet. I did want to at least top off my water bottle and debated just knocking on doors, but decided to cycle to the CalFire Bradley Station and discern the path forward.

I met Ranger Mike, we chatted about battlebots and I refilled my water bottles and did some bike recharging in their office. He was super helpful and friendly and I was glad to meet with him and chat. I did ask about the nearby towns, and where to look for a hotel / motel. The next town was Nacimeiento, which was basically just Camp Roberts, a national guard post, with nothing for resupply or for hotels. I needed to cycle hard to Paso Robles. He mentioned that 101 was so sparsely traveled around these parts, and the shoulders were uncharacteristically wide, but also that highway cycling is not recommended.

Cycling on the highway

I've never seen an on-ramp to a highway that was 8 miles long and completely void of vehicles. I followed along Bradley Road to its entrance to highway 101. I took some shaky-cam footage of my bewilderment. Dusk was approaching and I still had a ways to go to hit my ~120 miles of cycling for the day.

Finally I made it to highway 101, only 5 miles of actual on-highway cycling to the San Miguel off-ramp. Time to push it hard, every light I had was on high, and I was full of zoomies. The sun set fairly quickly and I was basically trying to stay as far into the shoulder as possible while staying as visible as possible. The exit in between for Naciemento was curious, as I had to quickly scurry across the offramp lane and back onto the highway. You know what's terrible, the road surface was amazing, cycling on the highway after being on gravel all day was incredibly pleasant, if it were not for me pushing as hard as possible to get to the next exit.

The highway zooming was successful and it hit my new 10 mile personal lifetime record.

With the sun fully set for the day, I made it to San Miguel. I evaluated the hotel options and they were not great, so I opted for a Lyft ride to a Mariott Hotel in Paso Robles, a 15 minute drive with the bike in the back of a very large minivan was worth it, I'd logged ~130 miles in a day and I was also a bit out of juice.

Day 3: Pismo Beach to Santa Barbara

Ok, give me some civilization and paved roads. The goal was to get down to Pismo Beach for a quick stop to enjoy the waves and then make my way to Santa Barbara. The previous day did set back progress a bit, the haul from Paso Robles to Santa Barbara would be a total of 146 miles and a pile of hill climbing. I did however have a trick up my sleeve to play catch-up. The space force base . As it turns out there's an Amtrak inside the space force base, and its accessible to civilians. The space force base Amtrak gets me to Santa Barbara and helps skip a huge hill climb at the end all while keeping the day's cycling down to ~106 miles. Lets go space cadets.

Ok, time to get back on track. The first part of the day's cycling was to make it to my initially plotted spot of Pismo Beach. Its gorgeous and a wonderful view. I stopped to take in the scenery and re-hydrate, then plot the remainder of the day's ride. Given that I had just cycled for a bit, it was prime time to acquire some more joules to aide in the day's travels. I stopped by Penny's All American Cafe [link] and topped off the battery at ~400W from an outdoor outlet covertly while hastily consuming a BLT.

Day 4: Santa Barbara to Los Angles

Day 5: Los Angles to San Diego

After having recharged in Los Angles on a friendly couch, I opted to "fast travel" out of the city. I did want to abide by the rules of robotics this trip and cycling through LA didn't really net the kind of scenic vistas I was looking for, and to be honest it had some remarkably abysmal quality roads. I jumped on the Surfliner to escape Los Angles never-ending stoplights and got out at Laguna Beach. The train was pretty quiet, I opted to sit downstairs with the bikes as I really wanted to make sure my only mode of transport didn't evaporate. One nice part about Amtrak is accessible 110V mains. I topped off my laptop and edited some drone footage. I was even able to upload some compressed edited clips to friends.

I was met with a proper surprise, Amtrak upload was 5X faster than a Marriott hotel . This was a pretty unexpected surprise. I sent along ~500 mb of clipped up footage to the Aether during my short train ride. I somewhat regrettably did not do a trace-route while i was onboard, I'm curious what the network routing was and who was actually supplying the connectivity. There was a pre-pandemic northeast corridor plan to add local point to point nodes along the line to provide actual in-train coverage, but it's not clear what happened to that program.

I spotted an atomic contraption and had to take a picture.

As the day wore on I made it to Encinitas, which is only 25 miles from the destination hotel. Its difficult to not just stop everywhere and take pictures.

I ended the evening at Mothership with compatriots, it's wonderful and the beverages are great.

Day 6: San Diego Rowing Club

It was fantastic to see so many people all in the same place. Conversations ranged from how adorable the couple were to, orbital re-entry of ostrich eggs. Throwing a mcmaster-carr bouquet really was quite excellent.

Concluding Remarks:

• California Weather Can't Be Beat

  One of the unsung heroes of this trip was the weather, at no point did I need to deal with rain or high winds, the skies were sunny and it really makes the trip go so much smoother. My only weather related slow down was having to periodically re-apply sun screen. The morning clouds did appear to take a bit to 'burn' off which also was a bonus, if I got an early start on the road, I was not immediately cooked by the sun. The number of small towns sprinkled about the route did also net a positive, there were generally an inordinate number of places to re-hydrate and re-supply.

• Having a single goal and a deadline keeps things moving

  Breaking up the trip into ~100 mile chunks, with a solid goal of 'make it to X' really helped keep things focused. Time management was a fairly curious one to keep in check, as there were numerous places to stop to grab some photos / videos. Longer duration stops were mostly fielded to getting a meal while trying to abscond with as many wall-watts as possible. For food i also opted for simple. Mechanical cycling and processing / digesting food is rife for issues so generally food was some form of a basic sandwich. Stops for food generally were ~30-40 minutes, which would also net 300 watt-hours of battery charging. Generally the only other logistical stops were for water resupply, which fortunately was available everywhere from Fire departments to bodegas.

• Route planing could have been better

  Due to my novice-ness I could have done a better job spying the route via google maps satellite view or equivalent ahead of time. I relied heavily on day-of routing which worked but was not quite ideal. As the trip progressed the day-by-day route planning did get better. Part of this was caused by the issues at the time with highway-1, which would have permitted a lot of sea-side views. I was also a bit befuddled by the whole Pendleton Base taking up both sides of the highway as i was approaching San Diego. Technically speaking some pre-planning would have netted me a route through the base, saving me a bunch of dubious highway cycling. It's wild that the only way out of sandiego is through an enormous marine base, how the heck is there not a service road.

• Strava familiarity

  This one was my own fault, prior to this trip my Strava routes had always been an hour long jog here, some short cycling there, but nothing that spanned the whole day. While a number of friends wanted to follow along my trip status, I was only really recording short disconnected jaunts, in some cases from a Hotel to a lunch spot, a lunch spot to a scenic vista, etc. Those all could have been one long route with appropriate pause / resume cycles. Having day long Strava rides documented also would have been a great visual indicator for each of the sections detailed above.

• The Little Drone did fantastic

  Every day the little Potensic Atom 1 survived all of the vibrations of gravel trails, pothole ridden streets and everything in between, while happily jaunting up for some gorgeous aerial shots at a minutes notice. Given that this is a two part system, I did end up adjusting my bike-phone mount to hold the drone controller to capture mobile shots, which made things a lot cleaner in terms of setup / tucking everything away. The 3d printed hard cases also did a great job keeping the controller and drone associated bits from getting banged up. These didn't really have fixed positions in my panniers so they would jostle around a lot

  An Actual Camera

  Part of this type of trip is to pack light, and while I didn't succeed at this by a long shot, i was a bit disappointed by the quality of phone-camera-photos. There is so much dynamic range in a sun-baked place like California, a number of phone photos really were either under or incredibly over exposed. This was also somewhat befuddled by the small non phone camera craze that was occurring at the same time. Somehow, every camera vendor at the same time opted for the prosumer large DSLR route, assuming that the small portable camera market would have dissolved into the cell phone camera realm. Oddly not the case, so at the time of writing, a 10 year old Panasonic tiny point and shoot is wildly sought after. I really would have benefited from something USB rechargeable, high megapixel count, high dynamic range with some form of OIS / stabilization.

  It's great to see friends succeed

  I've attended a number of weddings, either as a groomsman or just attending and it's great to see couples that actually succeed, parents who are actually supportive and friends to glue the whole ceremony together. Its an elaborate impedance matching network and man when it works it really does work. Both couples are fantastic people and I'm glad to see them off to their next adventures. Totally not jealous at all