It rained for a good portion of the night and was still raining when we woke up. Lenson headed off early to school, in the rain. Luckily for us, by the time we actually got ready and on the road, it had pretty much stopped. We had some cereal for breakfast and I enjoyed another shower before we left just to get me nice and woken up, ready for the day. That is one thing I miss about being home- having a nice hot shower every morning. But as much as I miss it, I would never trade being on the trip in order to be at home- the trip is just way to much fun, we are so lucky. For the first few miles it was pretty chilly. The sun came a few times, but for most of the day it was cloudy. Although we were in a pretty populated area for the first 5 miles or so, the traffic wasn't too bad. As soon as we started getting out of the city area, we had quite a bit of climbing to do. There were quite a few shorter steep hills at first, but once we got onto route 9 we almost immediately started climbing. We just went up and up and up and up and up. Curve after curve, I kept thinking that we would almost be to the top, but then we would just keep going up. We climbed for about 5 miles and reached an elevation near 2,000 ft. For some reason, I found that I had to stop a few times on the way up. I don't think I ate enough this morning for breakfast because I was starting to feel a bit shaky and almost like I had no energy to accelerate. The ride down the other side was SO cold. I had to stop a couple miles down to put on my extra coat and my warmer gloves-and I was ready to put my pants on too but decided to just tough it out. Burrrr. We made it to this little town of Boulder Creek where we found a little park to have lunch. We both sat right in the sun in hopes that it would help to warm us up. We eventually got nice and warm again, but it took a little while. Joe and I made some Mac and cheese for lunch and then got everything cleaned up and were on or way again. To our surprise, there was a lot more to the little town than we thought there was. They had a little downtown section and everything. From there, we passed through three more towns. They were just one right after another, only separated by a mile or two of road. The second half of the day's ride just few by after how slow the first 20 miles were. We had looked up the directions to our host, Bart's house, before we left Los Altos this morning. The ride into Santa Cruise wasn't too bad, but their roads are a little crazy. We stopped at a Safeway when we saw one, to restock on our mac and cheese and get some more muffins. From there we headed to find Bart's house. At one point, the road we were on met up with another road with the same name, one was Ave. and the other was Dr. On the directions that we wrote down earlier, we only wrote the name of the street, so when we got to that intersection, we weren't sure which way to go. We weren't expecting two roads to have the same name like that. So we took the less busy looking road. Not too long after that, we figured out that we were probably on the wrong road. We could see a bunch of houses off to the left and knew that we would have to cross over the highway next time we got a chance. About 5 minutes after riding down that wrong road, we got a phone call from Bart that confirmed it (he had been watching our SPOT). The good news is that weren't too far off from the road we needed since they ran parallel. Bart lived in a town that was a little east of Santa Cruz, called Aptos. When we got closer to Bart's house, we got to the top of a hill and found he was waiting there for us! He had ridden his bike to meet us so that we wouldn't have trouble finding his house. It was so nice to have a our very own tour guide! After settling in a little, we got to enjoy some beer and white wine. In fact, Bart had a kind of beer that Joey must have really liked, because he drank it pretty quick. It was funny because every time Joey finished a bottle, Bart brought him a new one. There were also some really tasty snacks to enjoy- my favorite was flat pretzels. I've never had those before and I liked them so much better than regular pretzels. The last presidential debate was on, so it was really nice to get to watch one of those since we had missed all of the others. Bart made a wonderful dinner of pasta and tomato sauce, fresh bread, and an amazing salad. After dinner I enjoyed a nice hot shower and was excited to sleep in a bed. What amazing hospitality. Bart told us that we were welcome to stay as long as we needed. We have kept in contact with Loic, who is still in San Francisco and were waiting to hear if he will go with his original plan of riding through Yosemite and Death Valley to Las Vegas, or if he will ride to LA. It turns out that it is already snowing over near Yosemite and the pass is closed. We got an email from him saying "Lets go to LA!" Even though it's sad that he won't get to see Yosemite, we are happy that we will get to see him again. So, since it was ok with Bart, we will wait here tomorrow and Wednesday for Loic to get here so we can ride again with him. We rode 50.01 miles today.
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