Wazombies

A warm summer weekend in the Bay Area sends thousands of people in their cars over the Santa Cruz Mountains, to the beach.

I made the same trip ... on my bicycle.

Sirens wailed as we climbed Old Santa Cruz Highway, heralding the latest crash on nearby Highway 17. Sure enough, bursts of cars soon appeared on the old road to the coast as Waze helpfully re-routed drivers around the backup. One of them nearly mowed me down.

I'm a skeptic when it comes to self-driving cars, but one of those would have yielded to me today. Instead, a zombie driver, unfamiliar with the area and fixated on his or her navigation screen, pulled alongside me as I approached Mountain Charlie Road and then veered directly across my path to make the turn.

I was semi-expecting this move after watching a few other vehicles make that same turn. No one familiar with these roads would take that steep, twisty, one-lane shortcut; they would stay on the main road and turn right at the summit. But Waze will recommend the shortest (fastest) path, thus sending a stream of zombies up Mountain Charlie.

When we reached the summit, we could see that the marine layer was thick; the descent was cold, and moist. On a sunny day I wonder where all those thousands of people go, when they get to the coast. On a day like today, I wonder even more. What do they all do?

There were only four of us planning to do the full route today; I contemplated re-routing straight to Corralitos, as I was pretty chilled and saw little point in biking all the way to the beach. But we were looking after one another, so I carried on.

We would not see blue skies again until we were partway up the return climb on Eureka Canyon Road.

It's been a while, so I had forgotten how long that climb is. Most of it seemed to be in better shape than I expected, but Highland Way certainly took another beating over the winter. I had shortened the route by starting on the south side of Lexington Reservoir, as 62 miles and 4,655 feet of climbing seemed like enough for me.

And, it was.