Adventure and story from Tyler Smith.

I’m a fan of half frame bags for my bike packing needs. My friend and I took a week to pedal from central California to Mexico to eat tacos. We mostly kept to the coast on Highway 1 bringing only the bare necessities. A half frame bag forced us choose our gear wisely and keep to the essentials. If we had bigger bags we would have only brought more gear that we didn’t really need. On our first day out we tackled the climbs of Big Sur, and let me tell you…we were glad we didn’t have more gear than we had. Half frame bags all the way.

We left from Monterey to Tijuana following the coast as best as we could. We slept in campgrounds and on couches along the way. By far the first day was the most difficult going through the multiple climbs of Big Sur, but the views made it all worth it. Each day we would take our time as this wasn’t a race. We’d eat fruit and snacks, stopping for meals when we saw an establishment that struck our fancy.

I believe that we stayed in Big Sur, San Luis Obispo, Buellton, Camarillo, Long Beach, Oceanside?, and San Diego. In Buellton we stayed with a friend’s grandmother. She was very excited to have guests. She showed us photos of her trip to Alaska, and gave us “local beer” which was FireStone Walker’s 805 (quite common in all of California).

We drank lots of coffee and had a few close calls with vehicles. The closest was on a bike path in South Los Angeles. We came around a blind corner to find a car coming right at us. Somehow this lady how gotten on the bike path in her car, and was driving down it. Very bizarre.

By the time we crossed the border it was late evening, and we wanted to make sure to get back to San Diego by nightfall. We stopped at the first place we saw to get tacos.