There is something magical about leaving work, meeting up with some friends, and going camping for a single night in the middle of the week. It’s like playing hooky, or finding some little slice of the weekend on a Wednesday. Known as a “Sub 24 Hour Overnight“, or an S24O to the cool kids in the back of the bus, they can come from a whim, at a moment’s notice:
With a feeling of anticipation, and maybe a touch of nervousness, gear is rapidly dug out of bins in the garage and loaded on the bike. Do I have everything? What’s missing? Crap! I’m out of fuel tabs! Where is my good bivy? Will it rain? And where in the Hell did that camping spoon go?!?! Rushing to and fro, finding, packing, loading, taking breaks to answer work emails and messages, praying that no emergencies pop up to keep me from missing that all important ride to the start of my escape from reality.
On the boat, and it’s almost empty. I’m swimming upstream against the tide of the commuters as they go home from their offices. Typically I am one of them. But not today. Today I worked from home, so that I could start early enough and leave early enough to have an effective departure. Leave too early and it’s trouble with the job that pays the bills. Leave too late and ride uphill into an increasingly cold, windy and dark night. There is a small, fine window for an S24O, you see. The destination, in this case Hawk Camp, has to be close enough to get to in good order, have time to set up camp and get dinner going before the temperature drops too far for comfort. The Marin Headlands is almost always fogged in, cold and damp. I’ve been there many, many nights and can count on 3 fingers the number of times I’ve seen the stars after dark.
Nathan pauses at the bottom of the climb to Hawk Camp.
Dirt road climbing in the Marin Headlands.
The sun sets on Harrison as he gets closer to Hawk Camp.
On the other side, I anxiously await the arrival of my co-conspirators. Nathan is a seasoned bike tourer, with a setup to match. Harrison is a rookie, this is his first time out, riding a full suspension mountain bike with all his gear strapped to his back. Once they show up, we roll out, amidst all the cycling commuters. They have laptops and work clothes in their bags. We have sleeping pads, food, water, stoves, ground tarps, warm clothes and a bottle of rum in ours. Knowing that they’re going home to more obligations…making dinner, doing laundry, whatever else…while we’re going to sleep in the fog and listen to the coyotes heightens the pure joy of our S24O. It is, for the lack of a better phrase, a breathe of fresh air from the almost never ending daily hustle of life.
A quick stop at the Presidio Sports Basement for supplies and we’re back to fighting the wind. It’s always this way. The wind whips in off the Pacific in the late afternoon, though the gap at the Golden Gate Bridge, and shoves you around, makes you work twice as hard, turns the sidewalks around the towers on the bridge itself in to sketchy affairs on gear laden bikes. From there the 3 mile climb up to Hawk Camp is, well, it is what it is. Nathan is strong, I’m not, Harrison is but riding a heavier bike with 13lbs of gear on his shoulders. We slog and granny hear our way up, racing the setting sun and cooling temperatures.
But we’re outside, it’s Wednesday night, we’re going playing hooky. Life is just fiiiiinnne!
The sun sets, our gear is out and the wind comes in harder. I brought a deck of playing cards but the gusts are so strong that they’ll blow away any cards set on the table. Harrison breaks out the rum, I heat up hot chocolate, we eat dinner, talk and listen to the roaring silence. That seems like a contradiction in terms, but you’ll understand if you ever camp up in the Marin Headlands. The elation of escape is gone, replaced by a tired, quiet, sleepy sense of satisfaction.
In the morning I wake up earlier than the boys. They’ve got a quick trip back to the office, but I have to catch a ferry back home to start the work day. The fog is still there, of course. That’s all right. It’ll clear as I cross over the Golden Gate Bridge, exposing a San Francisco that is no longer a vacation destination but the the source of our daily grind. But just outside it’s limits, the Marin Headlands await our next bout of mid week hooky.