Yosemite – Bear Valley – Modesto – Pleasanton – San Francisco: 344 km

Our ride out of Yosemite is perfect. It’s an endless descent underneath a perfect blue sky. We pay it back straight away when we’re faced with a 15 km climb. As always, we survive. There’s not too much to look forward to in the coming days. At least, not to our knowledge. The national parks are behind us, the route between us and the coast isn’t riddled with highlights like we’ve grown used to in Utah and Nevada. But at the end of our route is a pot of gold: San Francisco.

We ride through once green ranch land, now yellow because of the continues drought. We ride through peach and nut farms. California produces about half of all fruit in the US, and we can definitely see that around us. Nothing is ripe yet when we pass the enormous farms, so no picking for us. Everything around us is slowly turning more and more Mexican; the faces and the fragments of conversations we pick up, the supermarkets, the signs and of course, the food.

Our first night out of Yosemite we stay with a couple in Bear Valley. Their house reminds of colonial times. They’ve preserved it perfectly and it feels like stepping back into time with the comforts of now. Dismayed with America’s food industry they produce as much as they can themselves. Their garden is full of goodies, and they’ve even recently bought kettle. In Modesto we sleep in a city park. The city parks here are not the quiet safe once’s we’ve come to know and love in Idaho, Utah, Montana and Wyoming. We’re half sent away by security. We don’t obey. We’re woken up by homeless people and quads. We take our bags inside with us into our tents. The next day we can definitely feel the omnipresence of Silicon Valley. Tesla’s everywhere, rich people villages, and nearly everybody we talk to or stay with works in tech. We stay with one of the tech families in Pleasanton, a very pleasant town and a comfortable stay.

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And then we ride into San Francisco. To get to the ferry we ride along an elevated highway. The population of homeless people has been growing since we reached California, and has been increasing as we’re making our way to the coast. But something like this I’ve never seen before. We ride next to camps under the highway for kilometres. It’s endless. Tents, broken down cars, half open caravans make due for homes. The people are crippled, broken down and void from any happiness. It’s excruciating to see. And it seems so out of place compared to what we’ve seen in previous states, or what I think of when I think of the United States. These parts would not be out of place in a country riddled with poverty and political unrest. They are scenes from a third world nation. And it just goes on and on and on…

There’s probably not a better way to get into San Francisco than with the ferry. We see the skyscrapers standing tall and proud, greeting us over the bay. My dad lives here. He has been living here since I can remember. I was about 14 the last time I visited him, it was magical to spend a longer period of time with him. Now I’m excited to get to know him better as an adult. We’ve hung out over the years but often not longer than a day or so. Marijn and I made a big loop up north to get here. I’ve looked forward to San Francisco ever since I got off the airplane in Canada. We’re here now. Although it’s been a while, I’m not nervous to see him, but I have been making a big deal about it in my head. We cycle over market street in the shadows of the building that tower over us. It’s warm and busy, and the streets wind up and down over the hills the city’s build on. Just a couple more kilometres and in the doorway of his house, his arms open, will be my dad standing there, waiving us in.