day 0 deserves a paragraph, at least, to describe the chaos and anxiety that I was feeling. that was monday, june 13. i “graduated” the day before and spent almost all of monday with loved ones — and i moved out of my dorm and my home for the past year: schiff house.
other spokes members had flights into the bay area (aja woke up at 3am!) but we all slowly converged on an airbnb in east palo alto that we had booked for the night. when i got there, stress levels were high, but we all laughed about our anxiety and our relatively scant experience biking. the seven of us filled the room with our things, quickly got used to being in such close proximity to one another, and went to sleep in a mostly random arrangement of seven kids in three beds. (well, katherine slept on the floor after inflating her sleeping bag, causing a bizarre cpr-esque noise at 2am)
day 1 was when things started to go off the rails a bit. for one, i barely got any sleep because i’m such a light sleeper and i couldn’t sleep with the noise of snoring and roosters cawing well before sunrise (apparently they use their internal clocks to tell the time, not the sun??). i’m going to tell you the story of this day as a series of disasters, each of which has a delightful conclusion.
disaster 1: the bike rack. almost as soon as joel woke up, he walked outside to find that the bike rack on the car had been incorrectly installed. there was an issue with the way that the bolts had been installed, causing the bolts to become cross-threaded. as he tightened it, it would slip and become loose again. as a friend pointed out, this was a huge safety issue for any car driving behind us, so the first several hours of light in the day were occupied by finding anyone and everyone to give us advice or lend/sell us a bike rack. people from all over weighed in: joel’s dad, folks back at Stanford—even some friends on vacation in the Azores. joel volunteered to drive today and, as his first task, he went to replace the bike rack (and ended up buying a new one from REI). the old one was donated :)
in the meantime, we were all practicing with our bikes. i installed spd cleats on my bike and learned how to clip and unclip in the backyard, on some mulch—and I had my obligatory fall. we’d heard that everyone falls at least once, but that seems to be very false. in fact, several members of our team fell multiple times throughout the day.
disaster 2: navigation. joel had assembled a strava route that vincent loaded on his phone and led us along. but, we quickly ran into hiccups—there were detours, closed roads, roads we were uncomfortable biking on, and more. a lot of this happened in foster city, near civilization, so we flagged down locals and they helped us get back on track. everyone we interacted with today was tremendously helpful and kind—we wouldn’t have gotten here nearly as easily without them.
disaster 3: the seals. okay, hear me out: the first place that we stopped today was called “seal point park” so you’d imagine that it would have… seals, right?? wrong:
a disturbing lack of seals in seal point park
and, despite joal’s kind offer to “go look around for seals,” there were none to be found.
disaster 4: pedal problems. aja and i both had problems with our pedals. i had just installed cleats on my shoes so that i could clip into my bike, but i had overlooked two problems: first, i didn’t screw the cleats on hard enough, so they kept getting looser and looser as i rode; and second, the clips on my bike were wayyy too tight. so, on the second leg of our journey, my cleat came off of my right shoe and got stuck in the bike pedal. the other shoe was also dangerously loose, and those cleats almost also got lost. both cleats lost screws, too. but aja had the biggest pedal pains. their pedals were cross-threaded—the same issue as the bike rack—and they came fully off at one point.
we pulled over outside of sfo airport, at a ground transportation station; the operators of the station noticed we were in trouble and came out to help. they offered their pliers and duct tape and some advice about fixing things from their combined 60 years of experience in the air force. i was able to loosen my clips and pry the cleats out of them using the pliers—and sophia had a spare set of cleats, so i was able to stay clipped in for the rest of the ride.
aja was not as lucky. their pedal defied the humble power of duct tape. we called joel who picked her up and the two of them drove to a bike shop, which provided a replacement part (for super cheap!).
overall, today was a challenging but lovely day. we saw some beautiful sights in a mostly flat ride (though there were some hilly streets towards the end). finally, we met our very gracious host in his home in san francisco, ordered pizza, and met some other bikers who were visiting the US from ireland. for me, today was a small reminder of how important everyday people are to a journey like ours—to help us find our way and to help us when we fall.
41.77mi, 4:39:19 moving time
—parth