After a 19-mile (31 km) trek up into the coastal range and down again, my biggest quandary: how do you tell the difference between reaching your limit and exceeding it (no, there was no winery down that road)??? It was a beautiful day and I did one of those two—not sure which. After a beer on the house where I’m staying, the young lady offered to take my backpack to my room and I never objected—that’s a sign I was totally exhausted!
After coming down from the coastal hills, the road skirted an area similar to the Oxnard Plain just filled with citrus groves. A funny thing though: there must have been 50 fruit stands all selling about the same thing: bags and bags of oranges and orange products—all clones. Yet, this is not orange season. I tried to get it out of them where these oranges came from. Finally, one came clean and told me these are last year’s crop stored in the basement! Such is life!
Some impressions: Day can’t go wrong when you start your first cup of coffee served in a Julius Meinl cup (from Vienna, of course); just let this picture sink in—a wine tasting drive-through—what else could it be??; This is what beat me up early on; the orange stand clones!
