Welcome to Wine Country

Day 69 - Aug 11, 9:59pm
71 miles. Davis, CA to Santa Rosa, CA

Gotta love sweep. Today i had the honor of bringing the broom with the lovely Anne-Lise Caroline Cosart (watch the pronunciation!) To be totally honest one of my favorite things on the trip is taking breaks for reasons out of my control like road problems, flat tires, etc. Its sorta like oh, there's nothing i can do about this so i might as well just chill out, awesome! Take that as your whole day and you have sweep.

In the morning i decided to check my voicemail while chilling and happened to discover that BRIANNA GOODALE's AWESOMENESS KNOWS NO BOUNDS! aka she just happens to be visiting family in San Fran(yea ok Bri, whatever you say) and will be coming to greet me as we enter the beach. That brings my personal cheering to a grand total of 1! The wonderful Ava Tramer was unable to make it which was a huge bummer so this is a really awesome treat. Not sure when else you'll find me jumping up and down at 6am gleefully yelling in my spandex. I even temporarily forgot about how nasty the oatmeal i was eating was.

Major props to Subway yet again for pulling through with food for me and Anne Lise. We caught six folks eating an awesome breakfast at a diner a little further and ate our sandwiches there. If you've read anything from this blog at all, you can't help but be familiar with my somewhat irrational calorie needs. Well in case you aren't acquainted with them by now, just know that it took all of 10 seconds between the time that i downed an entire foot long subway sandwich 13 miles into the day, and the time when i began scavenging my teammates plates for leftover pancakes. Unfortunately there was only one remaining.

The day continued smoothly and generally uphill into lunch. Anne-Lise is super cool and really fun to talk and ride with. Get such a good vibe from that girl.

Around mile 59ish the major climb for the day started. It was intense. The topo map on the computer this morning was all sorts of funky colors when depicting the grades. Note to readers, seeing purple, aka 12% grade on any topo map is not, again, not a good sign. We started climbing and aside from losing half our body weight in sweat, were totally loving it. Its just such a rush to be able to conquer something so ridiculous as a hill like that and i can easily see myself enjoying, no, needing to do something insane like that on a weekly basis back in real life. The descent was again treacherous but I was more used to it and found that once i began trusting myself to navigate the breaking and turning i could relax and have fun with it which was great. Fearing for your life is not necessarily the best sensation to have going down a hill.

Overall the whole day was just gorgeous. We were in famous Napa Valley and rode through beautiful vineyard after vineyard with just the right amount of rolling hills. The hill in the second half was in a totally shaded forest that made for the best riding ever, especially when the downhill eased up and let us go comfortably at 20ish mph.

Things are definitely getting a little tense at points with people's peeves getting to a breaking point and with everyone kinda just losing a general sense of responsibility with so few days left. For me on this trip, personally its always been a point to not get myself worked up for too long about anything. there's just so little time here and its not in the least worth it. I like to think that the same goes for life in general. It sometimes boggles my mind how so un-chill people can be about the most ultimately meaningless stuff. Different folks, different strokes i guess.

Final day of riding tomorrow. I realized im gonna miss this so much, especially in the libraries in the middle of winter i assume. it just really hit me today how lucky i've been to basically have this be my job for the past 2 months despite all of the occasional complaining. As much as I'm ready for it to be over, it's pretty nice to be leaving on that note of realization and appreciation.