I think I might be a blog-aholic, which is unfortunate because I still hate that word...

Guys, I can't stop blogging. I don't care that we are finished with the official spirit animal spandex tour. Our bikes haven't arrived from southern California yet but we still have our absurd tan lines, American Gladiator-esque quadricep muscles, and day glow Lycra we can flaunt around Seattle, right? That seems like a reasonable way to keep the party going... right guys? Do I need to see somebody about this? Is anybody out there?
Amanda and I just got back from running around Greenlake in an attempt to maintain our sculpted legs and to my dismay, my knees are now in excruciating pain. They feel extremely disappointed in me, or maybe I am extremely disappointed in them, but regardless, they hurt. I need to ride my bike. I hate to think where MyPony is now; her limbs pulled apart, cold, alone in a box on a truck somewhere packed next to other "odd size" packages, or worse still, a mountain bike. MyPony is NOT odd size. She is perfect and I miss her. I think I might throw her a Welcome Back party upon her arrival, complete with a visit from my padded spandex ass and maybe some new handlebar streamers. If you would like to send her a gift, let me know and we can make proper arrangements and don't tell anyone because I don't want her to find out about the party...

Anyway, I am up for parading around Seattle in spandex if you are up to reading about it. Let us know.

I guess that's it

So we're done. We rode our bikes from Canada to Mexico. Crazy. I feel like it should have taken us longer. Or maybe I just wish I could keep going. My body is ready to keep going south, and My Pony is patiently waiting outside if I need her, but unfortunately my checking account needs some work so it's back to real life in Seattle for me. I will say I am extremely excited to see Seattle pals and to get sweaty on the dance floor, if my feet can remember how to step-touch. And I miss wearing shoes that don't make me look like a nerdy space alien ... my brown Vans in particular. But I am sort of disappointed that it is time to cross this one off the list.


I could take this time to go into detail about my deep and meaningful post bike tour reflections, or how in our last twenty five miles on the road we got lost in Chula Vista, or how Amanda and I got really cute haircuts today, but instead I want to share with you some of our bike tour statistics...with bullet points of course

• Total number of flat tires: 3. Amanda and I both got flats the first week in BC and then Sam suffered his second when we were getting made fun of for wearing spandex by some sexy surfers at a cliff side turnout in Malibu. A wet suit could sort of be considered spandex right?



• Fastest speed: 4o mph. Somewhere in Oregon I went down a long, big hill...




• Total number of clipless pedal related wipeouts: Three. Refer to our archives for the play-by-play and photos of the first two falls. I ate shit from complete lack of clipless pedal coordination the second to last day of the ride while Amanda and I were getting directions from some more sexy surfers in San Diego. Needless to say it was extremely embarrassing. So much so that Amanda even said she was embarrassed for me. I'm getting red in the face again just writing this. Totally not smooth.




• Total number of hotel rooms slept in: 2. After almost dying on the Astoria bridge we felt that we had at least earned a shower, and thanks to my Mom spoiling us rotten, the Lucia Lodge in Big Sur was blessed with our company after riding through the most beautiful section in California.




• Most miles in a day: 111. Duh.




• Least miles in a day: 36. This was in the beginning when we were wimps.




• Total number of days cycling: 34.




• Total number of days off: 4.




• Total number of raccoon related sleepless nights: 2. Episode 1 was in Gualala, California when the darn varmints tried to use Amanda's cell phone and Episode 2 was in San Simeon, California when I left my food out. What?




• Total number of times I accidentally ran my front tire into Amanda's panniers while riding way too close to her: 3. Sorry pal.




• Total number of my relatives I subjected Amanda to: 6. Dad in Orinda, Mom in Santa Cruz, sister Brooke in Santa Cruz, sister Blair in Huntington Beach, and grandparents Bee and Muck in Oceanside, California. She wasn't kidding about the family reunion tour thing.




• Least friendly area to ride in: North Bend, Oregon on Labor Day. This is the location of the infamous illegal bridge ride over Coos Bay and is home to dozens of unfriendly, cyclist-hating, ATV-riding, big car-driving, alarmingly loud horn-honking jerkfaces.




• Most beautiful and awesome areas to ride in: Everywhere in Oregon, except for North Bend and the Astoria Bridge, and Big Sur, California. Attention Oregon homeless people and smelly hippies: Showers in Oregon State Parks are FREE! FREE!? What are you waiting for?! Go get clean!




• Total number of times we got lost: once... less than 10 miles away from the border allowing us to have a surprise tour of beautiful Chula Vista, California. P.S. judging by the priceless looks on some of their faces, I think if Amanda and I had played soccer all the way down the coast we would have been way more popular among the Chula Vista-ians.




• Total number of Bike Posse Members: 10. Diego from Spain, Chuck and Jim from Madison, Max from San Francisco, Eli and Andrea from Seattle, Courtney and her dude (?) from Eugene, and Stephen and Pius from Swederland. We only rode near Stephen and Pius for about 20 miles, and they ride recumbent bicycles which are pretty nerdy, but they did help disperse the humiliation of exposing our horrific tan lines by exposing their own horrific tan lines with us at the beach today so they can be part of the posse.




• Total number of times we did laundry: 5.




• Total number of times people told us riding down the coast was "all downhill" and then laughed at their own joke: eighty million.




• Total number of cows that responded to Amanda mooing at them: one.

So I guess that's it. Amanda and I keep hearing that we need to come up with some way to continue posting our rants and raves on this blog now that the tour is over, so if anyone has any ideas, let us know. Until then, read all of our archived posts over and over like a crazy stalker.

My birthday was cool and all but...

TWENTY FIVE MILES TO MEXICOOOOOOOO!!!!!
That's right. We're almost done. I suppose this is the definition of bittersweet.
Thank you to everyone who left me birthday messages yesterday!
I forgot how much I love Jesse's Mickey Mouse b-day song until it reached my ears first thing in the morning. My big sister is hilarious. AND a total baller because she talked the Mayor of Louisville into giving the Committee for Public Art tons of money for making the city of my birth a better place to live. I'm so proud. I know that has nothing to do with riding from Canada to Mexico, but I spent a large part of my mental energy on my bike yesterday thinking good thoughts for her to achieve this and I'd like to think it helped, in a cosmic sense.

As far as bike riding goes... Here is a video of where our skillz are at this point in our trip (just imagine a SoCal landscape instead of cold NYC):
http://youtube.com/watch?v=nR2ygFn-yR8

I think Tina is currently covering all of the important points of the trip since my last post whilst sitting next to me in this silly San Diego caffe... so I'm just gonna say that I plan on listing the top 5 scariest things that have happened on this trip once we finish this thing... I think the parental units checking this here blog will be able to handle it in retrospect.

I currently seem to overwhelmed by being as close as we are to clearly be able to log my thoughts/feelings at the moment... So stay tuned for my final reflection posts and descriptions of the celebration going down in Huntington Beach this weekend!!!

PCWha?

Twenty five measly little miles left people! Amanda and I are consuming but not enjoying weak americanos and cold Costco muffins at a cafe right outside San Diego. We've already gone about half of the day's ride and it's not even 11 am, mostly because we were camped in some dirt right off of Highway 1 which conveniently is also the same route the Amtrack takes south of L.A. So in addition to the wet sea air that mysteriously saturated both our sleeping bags and tent throughout the night, Amanda and I were woken at 45 minute intervals by the melodious cacophony of the train. Needless to say we are a bit sleepy, but thoughts of tequila shots and kissing Mexican border patrolmen will keep us going strong.
As this is our last official day of riding the Pacific Coast Bike Route, I thought I would share a little something with you non-California natives about good ol' So-Cal. They have this highway. It's actually Highway 1, but since this is southern California they call it the Pacific Coast Highway or the PCH. Sounds beautiful right? You're thinking beaches, sun, surfers, convertibles. We were thinking beaches, sun, surfers, convertibles, and kids from 90210 high-fiving us along the way... Well folks, think again. The PCH, our guide book's chosen route for a good 100+ miles through this part of the state, is the most awful thoroughfare on Earth. It sucks. Everyone in the west Los Angeles area uses this highway to get around because LA traffic is terrible and it's a fast north-south artery. Riding a bike on it is just stupid, even if you are wearing fluorescent clothes. In fact, I think I may have even gotten singled out just because I looked like a highlighter. Between episodes of clenching my teeth so hard my jaw hurt and yelling at celebrities that got too close to me and My Pony, I came up with a couple of my own acronyms that are far more appropriate for this Pacific Coast Highway (and for your enjoyment I will use hyphens and 'n's where I please, thank you very much) ...

• Pretty Crappy Highway
• Potholes 'n' Cracks Highway
• People Crusher Highway
• Phoning Cellularly Highway
• Pricks 'n' Cars Highway

These are more descriptive of what I was thinking while riding (creative license with hyphens still applies)...

• Probably Cyclist Hell
• Passive Carbon Huffing
• Pedal Cranks Hurriedly
• Pony Can't Hang
• Prefer Cyclonic Headwind
• Please Cease Honking
• Put Car-bomb Here

So that should give you a better picture of what the PCH really is. All of you So-Cal people are living a lie! It's blasphemy really. Thankfully, we finished our last battle with that highway of which I shall no longer speak of this morning, which is good because I want to live to see the border today and I still look like a highlighter.

Next time I post something we will be done! Hurray!

San Luis Obispo to Santa Barbara = 111 miles

So we did it. We rode 111 miles yesterday from the doorstep of Greg Dudley's apartment in SLO to my awesome friend Devon Hay's house in Santa Barbara. You know I love bullet points so here are some memorable moments of yesterday's journey :

• the 13 mile gradual uphill section that we found ourselves doing during the hottest part of the day,
• eating lunch in an awful little city called Lompoc where there are no parks or benches anywhere so sandwiches must be enjoyed on patches of grass in front of dilapidated, highway-side apartments. From the looks on people's faces, this kind of picnicking isn't very popular in Lompoc.
• getting yelled at through the window by an angry driver of a turquoise truck as he got far too close to me while crossing a bridge ( just so you all know, when you yell at cyclists through your car, they can't hear you),
• as yesterdays mileage was about twice what we would normally do, naturally the number of wedgies doubled,
• getting a 'where'd you go?' phone call while riding from Amanda who had somehow missed the on-ramp for the highway when she was only about 50 yards behind me,
• stopping at a rest stop off highway 101 and looking at everyone and thinking 'why do you need to rest?'

In other news, our new Swiss recumbent cyclist friends Pius and Stephen are also in Santa Barbara, so once again Amanda and I have found ourselves biking with foreigners. They are traveling from Alaska down to Panama and are taking their time in the process so our travel schedules are not quite the same. However, we have made tentative plans to expose them to America at its finest and to reunite at Disneyland. times up!

San Luis Obispo is our bike tour version of Crater Lake...

For those of you not familiar with what I am referencing, I'll give you a brief synopsis and you will surely understand what has happened to us the last day and a half:
Crater Lake on the PCT became an unexpected detour we arrived at TWICE while avoiding the treacherous snows that had hit both the Sierras and Oregon in '05. This is not a place the hikers spend a lot of extra time in. Understandably so, as the campsites are absurdly expensive and there isn't really anything to do. At all. Despite this, I believe the most collective zero days on our trip (besides maybe Seattle) were spent here. A combination of making new friends, getting sidetracked and losing momentum, and well, ok... getting drunk and not wanting to exert ourselves the following day turned into unplanned days of apparent laziness.
This time, however, I did get to fulfill one of my bike tour goals: find a movie theater playing Superbad and see it. Check! Hilarious. Now I can stop getting bummed when every single person I talk to who has seen it tells me I should too. I'm in the club. After getting to see some of the greatest insult rants I've laughed over in a while, I was well prepared for the scene of departing the theater, heading towards Sam to unlock him from the bike rack, and realizing that some fucking @#$#%$@!&*@! had locked his bike to the rack AND SAM. So I stood there and put the last 2 hours of cussing I had absorbed to use. (After walking home, then walking back hours later, Sam had been released... however I think he is still shaking the humiliation of being associated with a crackhead's mountain bike in the middle of downtown all night.)
Another interesting parallel to this Crater Lake phenomenon is our attempt at a longest day coming into close proximity to our lapse in movement. Like our legendary Mt. Jefferson to Mt. Hood day (40 miles... wha? wha?!), today as we depart SLO our final goal is Santa Barbara, some 100+ miles away.
So that is where I will leave you. Tina and I are geared up, bikes ready, and it is still a reasonably early hour for us to achieve our longest day of the spirit animal spandex tour.
After Big Sur turned out to be a cake walk (beautiful though! drive that some time... that means you!), I think we'll probably chew today up and spit it out.

Tan Lines

Just sitting here at the afore mentioned butt crack waiting for mama Tracy to pick us up for our big day... so I thought I'd document one of my favorite side affects...

Jealous of this glove tan? Well, just wait till we get pics of the tan on our thighs up here. Soooo sweet.

(And thanks for your posi-thoughts thommy! Downhill is my favorite toooooooooooooooo!!!!!!)