On the few bike tours I’ve ridden, my elevator speech to the question regarding “the best part of the trip” includes a favorite natural scenic landscape and a fun cultural experience.
On the Turkey Tour, my favorite cultural experience was visiting Slab City.
I like the summary of Slab City is Krakauer’s Into the Wild.
The Slabs functions as the seasonal capital of a teeming itinerant society — a tolerant, rubber-tired culture comprising the retired, the exiled, the destitute, the perpetually unemployed. Its constituents are men and women and children of all ages, folks on the dodge of from collection agencies, relationships gone sour, the law or the IRS, Ohio winters, the middle-class grind.
And, my favorite visual summary is the school bus converted into a sailboat trailer.
I imagine the resident(s) live in the yacht year-round, roughly half the time on water and the other half on a school bus in the desert.
Here is dre’s map of our Turkey Tour. Slab City, or the Slabs, is near the far east point, Point F. From this view, I think the Salton Sea looks phallic.
The Slabs are three miles east of Niland, CA. Niland is a small town located within a few miles of the Salton Sea with a couple of restaurants, a gas station, a grocery store, and a laundry mat.
I find the amount craftsmanship very interesting in the Slabs. Not just a sailboat on a school bus, but the way so many people are able to live not only independently, but also communally.
Most people reside in RVs. Actually, if you look around the internet, it is frowned upon to camp in a tent. The reason for the frowning is not the more common American housing value but in disposing human waste. Like other biodegradable wastes, human wastes take much longer to biodegrade in harsh climates like the desert. Junk waste is actually the biggest problem in Slab City. There’s a lot of trash from transients, broken down cars, tires, regular trash trash, and dumping from Niland townees.
A part that I found interesting was the amount of solar cells there. Virtually all of the RVs have renewable solar power. Around a campfire, I learned the buzzwords in solar power: inverters, modified sine waves, and true sine waves took the cake in addition to the other more traditional electrical words.
I think it’s neat how independent these people are. They don’t pay “rent” or pay for utilities like electricity and water. Water is free behind the gas station, bee tee dubs. In addition to that, the campfire we found included retirees making fun of home-buyers. I don’t express the thought much because it’s tireless to someone with closed ears, but in society I am apart of the minority that thinks taking a large bank loan, in hopes of “my” housing value increasing is a bad investment.
Note that I don’t say it’s bad to have a house; there are pro’s. But, I think a loan is a bad investment so much that I view it is as a liability and a speculative gamble which I’m not interested in even if you rent out a room or whatever. (In my opinion, an apartment building is more of an investment than a house.)
Anyways. . . it’s always nice to find your other birds of the same feather to flock together. It was just a passing comment around a campfire, but it put a little smile on my desert chapped lips.
The community of the Slabs felt comforting. In our short 24 hour visit, people constantly introduced themselves to us and our claimed patch of dirt in the range of young seniors, middle aged, young adults, and even a boy of about 10 years of age. We were fortunate enough to make a connection earlier in the bike tour which catalyzed our ability to eat a great traditional Thanksgiving dinner which later led into the campfire.
Even without that catalyzed close knit experience, I think it is place worth spending some time to either winter over, stay a night, or even check out Salvation Mountain during an afternoon of your Southwest road trip. It may pull you out of your consumerist and isolated housing comfort zone; it may give you renewable energy ideas; you may find cool trash or all the books you want to take home in the library; but, it will help your craving for a shower.
If you are interested in more pictures from the Slabs as well as the rest of the Turkey Tour, check out dre’s picture journal on the ‘book.
In the beginning of May, Bender and I ran the 
My favorite part of the race was a Big Lebowski themed Aid Station (AS) supported by the Corvalis Search and Rescue group. The AS was complete with character costumes, White Russians, and a rug which really tied the AS together. The part of that AS that made me laugh for 5-miles though was a nicely timed sign. There was a little boy telling us runners the normal such things you might hear right before an AS: “Looking good; water, food, and medical support ahead; over halfway done now!” Then, as we turned a corner there was a sign: “8 Year Olds, Dude.” Hilarious.
On our first day, we learned that it took about 2 hours to put a bike together for touring after reassembling it from our respective bike boxes, required for air travel. To get from the airport to Half Moon Bay (HMB, yo) requires cresting a pretty large hill. We decided to stop in HMB, yo because the next campsite we knew about was 70 miles south and it was already 4pm. We set up camp at the Hike and Bike site at the HMB, yo Campgrounds. It was colder outside than I expected, about 50 °F.
We rode for about three hours this day until we arrived in Davenport. Here, we ate at a fun bar & grille. Then we traversed through Santa Cruz to get to Sunset State Beach Campground. This campground was quite secluded. The nearest town is Watsonville which is 7 miles away. The campground came with a neighboring strawberry field, which we took advantage of both for dessert that night as well as in our oatmeal the next morning. Here we met Darral and Gavin, which is Ni-vag and Lar-rad backwards. Lar-rad shared some beer and his campfire with us, while we had interesting conversations and some campfire music from Lar-rad’s guitar.
The ride through Monterey was slow and windy. It took us 5 hours to roll the first 28 miles, and because of that reason, we decided to skip 
This was my favorite day of the trip. We rode 23 miles, after breakfast, to eat lunch in Lucia at THE diner. We ate on a deck that overlooks an ocean break which crushed into a cliff. We ate the lunch with a rider we met earlier in the trip. I remember devouring my Mexican burger with fries and about 3 glasses of coke. This was good timing to fuel up, as our biggest climb of the trip, about 1000 feet at roughly an 8% grade, immediately followed.
We woke up early this day to ensure that we could make the 2pm train from San Luis back to Orange County. We had a big breakfast in Cambria where we took the waitress’ advice, “The bacon is reaaaal good, here!” Then we stopped in Morro Bay at the Top Dog Cafe. 
