MIDLAND Vol. XCIV
Midland School
MIRROR
Los Olivos, California
November 2025
No. 1
Tea Time
300 Miles, 7 Days, 2 ½ Fools
By Jay ‘26 It was the first month of freshman year when we caught our homesick classmate looking at Google Maps in English class, trying to figure out how long it would take her to bike home. It was about 350 miles from Midland to San Francisco. Later, my friend Mateo ‘26 and I thought this over during Status, when we (being freshmen) had no homework to do. According to Maps, if you biked 12 miles an hour, it would take less than 30 hours to get home. The two of us lived about a 320 miles’ ride from school. We turned to each other and said, “How hard can that be?” Both Mateo and I are stewards, veterans of many hardlucks and OL trips. We know that the hardest part of a trip is not the mileage, but the Three P’s: planning, preparation, and permission. The summer before sophomore year, we asked our parents and both received hard no’s. For some reason, they didn’t want two fifteen-year-olds on a trip together. It’s not like Mateo and I ever did anything to lose their trust, though, right? But come August before senior year, it was our last summer as Midland students. I was out of excuses to not go, and our parents had been whittled down by many a year of lobbying and polite requests. The planning began: plotting the shortest route that avoided highways, dehydrating meals, and of course promising my dad that I would work on my college applications before we departed. We began the journey on a sunny day, a week before the seniors were due to arrive at school. Mateo pulled a trailer with our tent, stove, food, and sleeping bags, while I carried a backpack with some water. The first day was the hardest, as we adjusted to the physical demands and crossed the Santa Cruz Mountains, gaining 2,800 feet of elevation before dropping down the other side along Eureka Canyon road at blisteringly fast (but of course still very safe) speeds, coasting most of the way to our first campsite at Sunset State Beach over fifty-six miles from my house–plus six for Mateo, to get from his house in Mountain View to mine in Sunnyvale.
A sweaty trio: Shae, Mateo, and Jay ‘26 after arrival
The next day was another fifty-five miles to a motel in Soledad, passing thousands of acres of farmland in the Salinas Valley. We took a rest day after that, a peaceful twenty-three miles to a public campground on the outskirts of King City. Day four was where our luck ended. After thirty miles of biking through empty, dusty grasslands, we arrived in the Exxon Mobil Oil Fields, outside of San Ardo. It was a desolate wasteland full of looming, stinking oil fields, sparsely populated with hydrogen sulfides, nitrogen oxides, other fumes, a herd of goats, and absolutely zero shade. Neither of us remember the experience too well, as by this point in the day, our minds were more preoccupied with the national heat advisory and the 107-degree heat beating down on us. But Mateo and I weren’t ready to quit… yet. Veterans of the Thacher Hike and multiple High Sierras trips, we pushed on, stopping for lunch between the highway and the oil field. After that, we kept pedaling over the highway and along the route that our faithful navigator, Google Maps, had set for us. After a pleasant, breezy ride down a steep hill, we arrived at the end of the road. “Just go forwards,” Google Maps assured us. Before us was a dirt road, continuing to the horizon. And between us and the next part of our ride was a looming metal gate with signs: “No Trespassing,” “Private Property,” and “NO BIKERS ALLOWED.”
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