Kernville/Sequoia Trip Under Way

I left this evening on my first out of town MTB trip, and I'm pretty excited for the week. I left tonight for four days of riding in the Kernville area and will also be riding in portions of the Sequoia National Forest. One of the most amazing things about the trip is that I have virtually no idea about the itinerary or logistics, I'm just along for the ride. My host is Sean M., who I've ridden with once before at Ted Williams. Also along is Brent, a co-worker of Sean's and Doug.

Sean and Brent had originally planned to go to Mammoth this weekend, but couldn't get enough people interested, so Sean floated the idea of a Kernville/Sequoia trip instead in a post on STR. When I saw his post, I immediately got excited. I had a pre-planned vacation scheduled for the week before, so if I could talk the boss into letting me start my week off a couple of days early, I would be golden. I volunteered to work on Monday (Labor Day) in exchange for my early start, and things came together.

I had originally thought we were leaving Thursday morning, but Sean PM'ed me on Tuesday and said the plans were to head out on Wednesday night after work so that we could ride late morning on Thursday. That sounded good to me, and I made plans to meet up with the rest of the guys at Brent's house Wednesday night. When I showed up at Brent's, all I knew was we were planning to be back sometime Sunday night, and were spending at least one day in Kernville. I didn't know where we were staying, what the eating arrangements were, or even where exactly we were going. And it was awesome.

As a complete control freak, I'm usually involved in every detail of any social activity I engage in, and it was amazing to not have that burden for this trip. Fortunately, Sean is an excellent organizer and very detail oriented, and we were in great hands all weekend. He bought all of the food we needed for the entire trip beforehand, and had all of the logistics worked out ahead of time.

I got to Brent's and introduced myself, and we made small talk until Doug and Sean arrived. They pulled into Brent's complex in Sean's huge motorhome, and suddenly I knew what our accommodations were going to be. And I was excited.


We threw Brent and my bikes on the amazing trailer Sean built for Moab earlier this year and was pulling behind the motorhome. We were travelling in style, and I was finally on vacation for the first time in almost four years. We actually got underway about 9:15, and the plan was apparently to make the 5 hour drive to Kernville in one shot and then ride late tomorrow morning.

For the first few hours, the drive was uneventful. We didn't talk a whole lot, because it was a little loud in the back of the motorhome and we didn't know each other that well. We stopped for gas and a snack in Hesperia, and then began the desolate portion of the drive up to Kernville. I was actually dozing on top of the queen sized bed in the back of the motorhome some time around 1 a.m. when I heard a loud bang and felt a vibration beneath the motorhome. Sean quickly pulled over and it was apparent that we had had a blowout of the interior rear tire. Because the motorhome was a dualy, we were able to drive on it, albeit slowly, into the nearby town of Ridgecrest, which was about 45 minutes away.

Once there, we contacted the local AAA tire shop and woke up the people who worked there to have them change the tire. After a few minutes, Sean was told that his AAA coverage didn't cover the motorhome, and they wanted to charge him something like $150 an hour to change it.

Since Sean is no idiot, he refused to pay the shop that ridiculous sum, and we decided to sleep in the motorhome in Ridgecrest and have another local tire shop change it the next morning. So we went to sleep, right there in the AAA shop's parking lot. The joys of having a motorhome.

I slept pretty well, and we got up the next morning and were at the tire shop by 8:00 a.m. Unfortunately, they didn't open until 9. But once they opened, they changed the tire in no time and we were quickly on our way.



As we headed for Kernville, I was excited and a little apprehensive about the rides to come. Since July of last year, I had ridden an average of at least twice a week every week until early July of this year. When the boss left the country on vacation, and work became a horror show, riding was one of the first things that I had to cut back on, and as a result, my local ride on Sunday was the first time I had been on a bike in more than three full weeks. And my riding had tapered off a little even before that, at least in terms of frequency because of my schedule.

So I was headed into four days of riding, with three guys who I knew to be excellent mountainbikers, each with considerably more experience than I had. But rather than focus on being nervous, I decided to have fun with it, do the best I could, and enjoy what seemed to be the perfect riding trip. And I figured if I did that, everything else would take care of itself.

And it did.