Day 4, July 26.
Woke up with the
sunrise. Put the tent down and got back on the road. Rode back to Mc
Donald's for the morning breakfast and another ice-cream. I love those. Looked at the maps figuring out what route to take after Palmdale.
In about 30 minutes I was in the town
and stopped at another Fast food place for biscuit and gravy. Then I stopped at
the store and bought a lot more food this time, as I was hungry all the time
and this was finally a place with normal stores. I again bought plenty of
different kinds of cookies with cream, nuts, couple of cans of meat and also a
flashlight with spare batteries.
Then I rode down to Target and bought a
head lamp for the bicycle with a dynamo that turns by touching the tire. I
wasn't sure how good that stuff is, but for 10 dollars it was forth trying.
I stopped by the sporting goods store
and found out where the bicycle shop in town was. Arriving there in several
minutes I met a nice middle eastern man, who was
really friendly. First I asked if he wanted to trade the U-lock for the bottle
cage, which he did; then after installing it, I bought another one. Both very plain and simple black color metal cages at $5 each.
Course I paid $5 for both, and got rid of something useless. :) The bike is
much improved now... being lighter and with easy access to bottles. They also
transferred the weight from high rear position to the low central, which
enhanced stability greatly; no doubt.
I also had a cyclocomputer
with me that couldn’t be installed because I forgot the instructions. Luckily,
they had exact same computer for sale here and one of the workers helped to
adjust it to the wheel size and install it on the handlebar. While the bike was
inside anyway, I installed the dynamo, but the head lamp bracket wasn't fitting
properly. I bent it some and even grinded the extra metal, which the owner
kindly allowed me to do, making sure I had the glasses on. A lot of help from
this people in this shop, it was time to get out of the as I already spent
nearly two hours there and didn't want to abuse their hospitality. The name of
the shop is "The House of Bikes". :)
Once I was back on the road, I enjoyed
the reading of the current speed - a nice, new feel.
Then I stopped at Wal-Mart and bought a
sleeping bag. At 3 Lbs weight and rated to 45 degrees, $10 was more than
sufficient price for it. :)
As always in any city, I was glad to
visit the library, which was couple of miles from Wal-Mart. While pedaling
there, a rain started and I got pretty wet; it was warm though. 30 minutes in
the library was enough to check e-mail before they started closing.
When I walked outside, the rain had
already stopped. A family from
My next direction was going North East
on
I passed a little town of
In an hour or so, I sopped near the
trailer park. Man in the office showed me where I could fill up the bottles and
started a conversation about his love for backpacking, out door activities and
so forth. When I asked about the route ahead, he brought several nice maps and
let me have them. One was the AAA map of the
When I got back on the road it was
getting closer to the sunset. I rode into a town called Rosamond. Looked around. There was a Mac Donald's and some big grocery
store like Albertson's or Ralph's, where I got some bread and grapes. When it
was dark, I started looking for a place to pitch a tent. This is so easy with a
bicycle... which can be hidden and is completely quite; in comparison with the
car.
I rode to the side of the city, and
near the railroad there was complex of some old garages, about half a mile
long. I rode along the fence and found a perfect spot, facing the field. There
I unloaded the bike, took a bottle shower, put up the tent and enjoyed a quite,
undisturbed night of rest.
Today's total - nearly 40 miles.
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