For many, the word “camping” often conjures nostalgic memories of beautiful summer nights, s’mores, telling horror stories, and settling around a cozy fire, for me it usually does, the epitome of what one might call a “granola” lifestyle.
Last night was definitely a beautiful summer night, however, there were no smores, and definitely no cozy campfire. This time, the only camping horror story was how sore and achy we felt today waking up in Sly Park Campground. Today was many of our team’s first time waking up in a campground after sleeping in a tent, and I got the feeling that for them, it might be the last after this trip. As Helen put it, “yeah no, I’m definitely not granola enough for this.”
After discovering the trials and tribulations of the granola lifestyle, our team rallied around a hearty breakfast of overnight oats and boiled eggs (thank you Chef Anna for cooking) and decided to try and hit the trail early. And unlike the past couple days when we decided to do the same thing, we actually succeeded! Unfortunately, the trail ended as early as it started. Those of us in our sag wagon discovered that the main road on our route today was snowed out, leading us to turn around to let the others who were biking know.
Then came decision time. The route that we had previously planned was the only bikeable route to our destination for the night, as the alternate course option was a narrow, windy, highway with no shoulder and sheer cliffs. Thus we had to decide whether or not to risk biking on the highway, or ferrying our members from a nearby Safeway (which has become a main base of operations in each of the towns we’ve stayed in) to our host house for the night. We decided on the latter of course, erring on the side of safety (and what was actually possible). We made two trips, driving a total of 5 hours to get everyone to South Lake Tahoe.
There, we met our wonderful hosts, one of whom was a Stanford alum who had an extensive cycling history, including tours in the US, East Asia, and South America. He warned us that once you do a big cycling tour like ours, you’ll never want to stop touring until you have to, and I guess we’ll see – although for myself, I have a sneaking suspicion that he’s right. For that I would have to completely commit to the granola lifestyle, but honestly, I feel like I’m already halfway there.
Signing off,
Jordan