The Sun Burns Just The Same In California

We saw all these bike-rental outfits advertising bicycle tours of the Golden Gate Bridge and we thought it was a brilliant idea. The way it works is you pick up your bike at wherever, ride it along a dedicated bike path on the bay to the GGB, across the GGB and into Sausalito. After a couple hours of suffering Sausalito sticker shock you roll your bike onto a ferry and ride it across the bay and drop off your bike. It’s about 8 miles of bike riding. It is such a great idea that approximately 97% of tourists in the city at any one time are also doing it. At times it feels like you are in the pelaton of the Tour de France. Except you are going much, much slower. At the bike rental place I asked Gina if she thought sunscreen was in order. Despite it being light-jacket temperatures the sun was high and bright. “Nah, I don’t think so,” Gina inexplicably replied. “OK,” I replied with equal inexplicability.

We made the 5 miles to the beginning of the bridge and I had shed my jacket and could feel my tender pink arms and face sizzling. I knew by then that it was most likely going to be bad. I had been on the lookout for any kind of store that might carry sunscreen but the bike path stayed in mostly parks and residential areas, so I was SOL on that front.

Somehow I made this picture and the bike/walking path looks reasonably uncrowded. I can assure you it was not. We spent most of the time kinda straddling and walking the bikes. The pushing from behind from other riders was so intense that I didn’t feel like I could stop and really enjoy the bridge. One cool thing is that while we were on the bridge there was some kind of filming going on of racing boats in the bay. A helicopter with one of those gyroscopic cameras on the front flew under the bridge a couple of times from the ocean side capturing a big group of power boats heading under the bridge at top speed.

We finally made it across and down into Sausalito where apparently a lot of rich folks hang. We checked a marina full of huge yachts and then made our way onto the ferry. These houses are on the hillside in Sausalito overlooking the bay.

Being of the sea, I was pretty fascinated by the giant ocean-going vessels plying the waters of the bay like this one that the ferry eventually passed behind at about 100 yards.

We got a pretty great view of the ship as we passed by.

We also passed pretty close to Alcatraz. By this time we were feeling the effects of the sunburn. The last time I got burned that bad was 7 years ago in Destin when I went out into the waves and the gallons of sunscreen I had applied evidently got pounded off in the waves and I didn’t have enough sense to reapply before lounging on the beach for a couple of hours. It hurt. After we returned our bikes we didn’t even feel like going out to eat. We just stopped at a Walgreens to get premade sandwiches and sunburn medication before going back to the hotel to crash.