Day 70. San Francisco, California.
We should have realised that something was up when we found the motorbikes covered in ash this morning. Hearing the staff talking about evacuations should have been another clue. It wasn't until we were on a surprisingly busy Highway 1 and queuing for fuel that we heard about the California wildfires. It turns out that we were in the evacuation area for Santa Rosa city, where residents had been told to evacuate at 01:00 this morning. At lunch it was quite shocking to hear some of the people on the next table talking about how they had probably lost everything. As we headed further south the smoke got worse until we eventually broke into clear air around Muir Wood (just outside San Francisco). From there it was over the Golden Gate Bridge and then into Chinatown to our hotel. We've got a couple of days now to get some repairs done to the bikes and then we can plan the next stage of the route once we know what is happening with the fires!