Lakeport, California

After repeated “Bicycles Prohibited” signs denying me roads I wanted to take to reach Sonoma and it’s Carnegie, I decided to head north to the Carnegie in St. Helena in the heart of Napa Valley, then descend upon Sonoma after a couple of days of gathering Carnegies further north.

The detours were becoming increasingly frustrating. I never knew when a road I was riding would suddenly ban bicycles despite a nice wide shoulder.  The agony was compounded with no viable alternative, forcing me to take long detours, prolonging my time in the rain.  I left one road that banned pedestrians and bicycles with motors, not realizing that didn’t apply to me.  When I later came upon a sign that banned both bicycles and bicycles with motors, I realized my mistake.

I was forced to go up to Napa in search of a bicycle-permitted road over to Sonoma around a mountain ridge and river that stymied a direct route.  While at its non-Carnegie library drying out and warming up and charging my iPad a police officer came in.  He’d been summoned by a scruffy itinerant who’d had his bicycle stolen by someone at a homeless encampment along the river through the town and was trying to get $40 for it.  He wanted the officer to help him recover it.  I was able to ask the officer if bicycles were allowed on Highway 29 up to St. Helena eighteen miles away.  He wasn’t sure, but he told me there was a bicycle path alongside it.  It was a little tricky to access.  The route he gave me through a church parking lot was blocked due to construction, forcing me to do some more circling around.

It had been a long day of being stymied.  I had gone into a McDonalds for a burrito, but mostly for some charging of my iPad.  It was another with no outlets available to the public, as all too-often is becoming the case. A semi-homeless guy heard me ask an employee if there were any outlets.  He told me the nearby Taco Bell had one just to the left of the door.  I didn’t mind another burrito, so ducked in there.  The outlet was there, but was now guarded by a locked cover.  Fortunately libraries haven’t stopped making electricity available, as I endured in the UK.

The sultry weather dampened whatever glamour the succession of small vineyards, which were shoulder to shoulder for miles, had to offer through the narrow valley of Napa flanked to the east and west by ridges.  Tastings were advertised at nearly all.  Camping was looking very iffy, especially with the ground so soggy.  I had been lucky to find some high ground the night before in a line of firs around a huge fenced-in electrical plant.  I suspected it might have had cameras around the complex, but no one responded to my presence.

With wet feet and gloves, I was prepared to pay for a motel.  I had checked on-line back in Napa and most were two or three hundred dollars.  I thought I came upon a cheap one on the outskirts of St. Helena, but it was $150. The proprietor laughed when I asked if there was anything for $50 in the area, saying I wouldn’t find anything cheaper than what she was offering.  I asked about camping.  She said it might be possible at the fair grounds in Calistoga eight miles up the road.  I had just enough daylight to reach it.

But first I had to pay my respects to the Carnegie in St. Helena, my only one of the day.  It was a block off the bustling highway through the town on Oak Street. It had been a community center since 1979, a year after this Mission/Spanish Revival building had been placed on the National Register of Historic Places.  It retained its heritage, identified by “Carnegie Building” arched over its entrance.  One of the two plaques on either side of the entry said it had had a “seismic retrofit” before its rededication in 2010.

Three miles up the road that had begun climbing from the near sea-level of the valley, I came upon a sign to a state park in the first forest amongst all the vineyards.  I had a moment to decide whether to continue on to the fairgrounds or to head up the road into the forest, even though a sign indicated no camping.  After asking, “What would Daniel Boone do,” I turned up the steep road.  I went all the way to the barricaded entrance, then turned into a parking lot for buses.  A small ditch around it was
filled with fast-rushing water.  I lifted my bike over it and pushed into the squishy forest, further dampening my feet, with the moisture penetrating through the holes where my recessed cleats resided.  I found some fairly solid ground and quickly set up my tent in a lull from the rain.

This was easily my most isolated and genuine campsite so far.  I could light a candle for the first time and hang my socks over it to dry.  I had stockpiled some newspaper to suck the moisture out of my shoes.  All was semi-dry by the morning, though it wasn’t so easy to crawl out of the warmth of my sleeping bag, back into the cold and damp air.

The rain held off long enough for me to make a seven-mile climb over a 2,400 foot pass and complete its descent before I came to Middletown and made the turn to Lakeport for the day’s only Carnegie. I had a second pass at 3,000 feet past acres and acres of fire-scorched trees.  Snow mixed with rain, not enough to gather, though snow did line the road from previous heavier storms.  It was more climbing than the previous eight days of this trip.  The rain was negligible, but the temperatures were the coldest, below forty. The rain of the night before was rushing down along the road seeking its own level.

The carnegie-libraries.org website, that is devoted to the Carnegies of California, has become an indispensable resource.  It contains much of the information that a book would have, two or three paragraphs on all the state’s Carnegies, even those that have been demolished.  It called the Carnegie in Lakeport the most scenically located of them all. It is certainly the best setting of the twenty-one I have seen since I arrived in Sacramento ten days ago

It resides in a park on the shore of Clear Lake, the largest lake wholely within California.  Lake Tahoe is larger, but it is partially in Nevada.  Clear Lake has one hundred miles of shoreline and is nineteen miles long with a surface area of sixty-eight square miles.  It sits at 1,300 feet and has snow-tinged mountains in the back ground.

This Classic style library with Carnegie over its entrance was replaced by a new library in 1985 and has housed government offices since.  It’s beauty may not be my fondest memory of this town of 5,000.  It could be the small one-man bike shop, whose forty-year old proprietor, a tinkerer extraordinaire, figured out how to pry open the small attachment to my dynamo hub and reinsert the twin wires.

He didn’t flinch at all when I presented him with the puzzle which he had never seen before, but dove right in with a razor blade and pliers.  After several minutes he went to the Internet and Shimano’s how-to page and voila, he had the final secret of how to pop it open.  He was so pleased to have solved the mystery, he didn’t want any lucre.  He was a hero and savior, reestablishing my ability to generate electricity, and sparing me of the need to snoop around McDonald’s and Taco Bells for electrical outlets. 

Another of the day’s highlights was finding a California license plate, hopefully the first of several.  I was also gladdened knowing the mighty Redwoods await me in Willits, my next Carnegie town forty-four miles to the northwest on Highway 101.  Then I can complete this loop and head south through Ukiah and Santa Rosa back to Sonoma for its Carnegie and a handful of others with the the Golden Gate Bridge awaiting me into San Francisco for it’s bundle of eight and another of six across the bay in Oakland. The forecast is for a respite from the rain until Thursday.  San Francisco had over two inches eartlier in the week, it’s most ever.  There have been mudslides and road closures and multiple feet of snow in the Sierras, but most are cheering this drought-busting windfall and don’t object to more.