San Diego Day 4

Today was our shake down day and the traditional dip the rear wheel in the Pacific ceremony. I think these pictures speak for themselves. Somewhere along the line I will need to get ahold of a picture or two from the front that was taken. 

So this one is supposed to be everyone. Mitch is on the left. I need a better picture.

Pushing my loaded beast of a bike out of the sand I tweaked my back just a little. Not enough to be a problem, it doesn't hurt but I can tell I strained a muscle back there. It may be more noticeable tomorrow or the next day.

I stuck this one in for my wife. Our (her) dog's name is Cable. This is near the Dog beach so seemed somehow appropriate that we stopped at Cable St.

We rode down to Cabrillio National Mounument, the second time for me. You may notice that I'm fully loaded while other choose to go lighter for the day. I'm glad I did but it did make one nasty hill pretty hard to climb and I ended up at the back of the pack.

I kind of liked these wind swept trees at the Mounument.

Just before we left this large navy ship went through. 

After I got back I ran a couple of errands, including tracking down batteries for my secondary computer. It has not been working for a few months now and I figured that if I was going to haul it across the US, it would make sense to make it work. It provides altitude and rough gradient output which is somewhat useful.

After getting my bike computer working again (I don't like wireless transmitters for bike computers), I took a shower and Hal and I shared a washer/dryer to do laundry. Turns out he has an electrical engineering background working on music hardware. Lot's of interesting things to talk about.

Sitting around waiting for dinner.

Dinner is ready... Mitch provided dinner. It was excellent. Pie and ice cream for dessert. After dinner we had our evening map meeting and drew cards to decide who was cooking. Turns out that Shelly, Max and I are on the first rotation. Our first decision was to choose to go to the Indian Casino tomorrow for dinner instead of cooking it our selves. But we are on the hook for breakfast and supplying lunch materials. We will need to stop at a store on the east side of Alpine and pick up food to carry to camp.

Today's ride. (I again forgot to start my Garmin until a mile or so down the road.) The ride out was with the group. We found another steep hill and based on me being fully loaded I was the last one up. On the way back I took an alternative route back down to the Sunset Cliffs again.

View Map My Ride Map

Several of my fellow riders have told me that they are following this blog as well as some of their loved ones back home. We should see some new posts from some of them as we progress.

Phil getting a trim from his wife.

Tomorrow the ride begins in earnest. It isn't a particularly long day, but with 2000 feet of climbing and a somewhat convoluted route through San Diego I suspect that there will be some interesting tales by the end of the day. Several of us are shooting for an 8AM departure time, which Hal, who has done this ride before, suggested was optimistic.