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Title: Bicycling the Pacific Coast: A Complete Route Guide Canada to Mexico by Tom Kirkendall, Vicky Spring ISBN: 0-89886-562-X Publisher: Mountaineers Books Pub. Date: June, 1998 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.58 (12 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: This (and a bike) is all you need to tour the coast
Comment: The book is a tremendous resource. I toured California from North of SF to L.A. and found the routes in the book to be invaluable. There are places where you just wouldn't know what to do without the book's guidance. Almost everyone we met along the way had read or was using this book. That said, by 1995, a few streets had changed. The mileage was consistently 5-10% off of what I experienced, but eventually we adjusted. Tom and Vicky are camper-bikers, so their book is targeted at people who want to ride from campsite to campsite, but the book is still invaluable, even if you'll be staying in hotels or B&Bs.
(Jim Kee
Rating: 5
Summary: The most complete Pacific Coast cycling book
Comment: From someone who had never toured on a bike before, this book was my "bible". Having now toured many times in many different places, this book is the most complete, most accurate and most detailed I have ever seen. While riding down the coast, I photocopied the second half of the book to give to a German man who was floundering with his cycling association maps. He loved the review of the day's elevation climbs the most of all. On my second trip down the California coastline, I gave the book away to another couple. It's just that good, a must have book for the Pacific Coast.
Rating: 4
Summary: Very Good and Useful Guide
Comment: I bought this book from Amazon in 2002 and used it during a ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles in August 2003.
It's a very good guide. The directions for their main route were quite detailed and usually clear. I got lost a couple of times, but never badly and it may not have been the book's fault. Milage totals were usually pretty close, although there were a couple of segments that were off somewhat. The guide is much more useful if you photocopy the pages with directions. Then you can use them as daily route slips. The book can be kept in a pannier during the trip to be brought out in the evening to get an overview of the next day's route and stuff you might see along the way.
I also enjoy the overall feeling that it was written by dyed-in-the-wool cyclists for dyed-in-the-wool cyclists. This authenticity comes out sometimes in little asides, such as the authors' comment that a northbound tunnel near Gaviota (CA) is like riding through a high-suction vacuum hose. If you've ridden a bicycle through that tunnel, you'd know how dead-on that description is.
I didn't give the book 5 stars (although I would have given it 4.5 if there was an option) because it doesn't provide much for the bicycle tourist who prefers hotels and hostels to camping. An appendix with a listing of youth hostels and a selection of cyclist-friendly hotels on the route would make the guide more complete. It would be especially helpful if the authors did this for the more remote regions on the route. The authors also might want to add a little more commentary and detail to the alternate routes they sometimes suggest. For example, the authors suggest an inland route along US101 as an alternate to Highway 1 through Big Sur when the road is closed (which happens fairly often) or during the height of the tourist season. Well, if you're going to suggest a 100-mile detour, do more than just put a shaded line on a not-very-detailed map. (By the way, I don't completely agree with the authors' assertion that Hwy 1 through Big Sur is too trafficy to comfortably ride during the tourist season. Maybe it is on weekends, but I went through on a Monday and traffic was only moderate and not particularly hard to deal with.)
Overall, though, this book is well worth the money.
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