Friday – San Jose to Chico
We started our trip at 10:10am on this Friday morning. Before leaving town, we stopped by an ATM to get cash, then headed north on I-680. We would spend pretty much the whole day on interstate highways. We stopped in Alamo (south of Walnut Creek) to stretch our legs at 11:05. We then continued north to I-80, then to I-505.
We stopped next at a convenience store in Winters for a snack and to stretch at 12:30. After that, we rode north on I-505 to I-5, stopping for lunch at a Jack-in-the-Box in Dunnigan, CA. As we approached the Dunnigan exit, we saw smoke billowing up from a couple miles northwest of Dunnigan. While we ate our tasty sandwiches, we saw fire trucks, ambulances, and police cars getting off the interstate and heading in the direction of the fire. After lunch, we rode out towards it. A sheriff’s deputy stopped us before we could get within sight of the fire. We asked him what was burning, and he said “Just some grass and a couple of cars.”
Unable to go further, we turned around and headed back to the highway. Before we got back on it, though, we pulled into a gas station and filled up the tank. Another BMW motorcycle was filling up next to us. We told him where we were going, and he said he had just come down from that way. He had ridden across Hwy 299 from Eureka, and said it was in great shape.
With the tank topped off, we continued north on I-5 to a rest stop north of Willows. We walked around to relieve the tightness in our legs from sitting on the bike, and we re-filled our water bottles. Then it was back on the road, heading for our last stop of the day. We got off the interstate at Orland and headed east on Hwy 32, a two-lane road that took us the rest of the way to Chico. The Best Western where we had reservations was right off of Hwy 99, and we missed it the first time by. We saw in on the second pass, though, and we checked in around 4:00.
Chris took a nap, while I plugged in the laptop and checked for new e-mail. When we were both rested, we got cleaned up and walked up the street to a sushi restaurant named Gen Kai. I got an assortment of nigiri sushi (mackerel, octopus, squid, shrimp, eel, and several kinds of tuna and salmon) and Chris had a bowl of teriyaki vegetables and rice. The food was quite good, but I’ll probably skip the octopus from now on — too chewy.
We took a detour on the way back to the hotel just to get more kinks of our legs. We bought some Chico postcards, but the store didn’t have any stamps. Neither did our hotel, but the desk clerk told us how to get to the post office. We planned to stop there the next morning on our way out of town.
Back at the room, we watched TV for a little while, and then called it a day.
Stats:
Departure: 10:11am
Arrival: 3:50pm
Distance: 230 miles