Mojave The Hair Dryer

Today was the first challenging day of the trip and rather than tell you about it , I'm going to give you a run down of a typical day when it's not 102 with a 40 mph hair dryer attempting to shred your tent or cook a computer in the shade. However, I must mention I'm in the middle of freaking nowhere and my phone is giving me a super fast wifi internet connection. (if I had a desk I would be nearly at home, minus my my wife, home, cats, water and sub triple digit temperatures).

Normally a wildly shaking tent would be annoying but today it means the wind is blowing and that is a blessing. My clothes are stiff as cardboard from salt and this makes it easier to get the proper leg in the proper hole.

Typical morning: Wake at 5:30, it's not hard because the sun wakes you up 20 minutes before this. Help set up the breakfast, this includes watching water boil and laying out the yogurt, fruit, muesli and other  yummy fixings while adding to the coffee stash which was started well before the morning circus.

Next I break down my tent and camping gear and load it into a van and load up my bike with emergency group gear, cameras, water and food. From camp I either "sweep" or "flag." Flagging is when I leave early and flag the route with surveyors tape for the riders to follow and sweeping is when I'm the last rider of the day and I make sure nobody has decided to call it a day on the side of the road. I enjoy the sweeping because I can take all the photos I want and still make it to camp as the last riders que in.

On the road anything can happen, most of the time I am cruising beautiful scenery and constantly taking photos. Sometimes I'm freezing, sometimes I'm melting but most of the time I'm having a great time meeting piles of inquisitive people as I go, who are just as excited about my journey as I am. How do you tell  someone you are riding you bike from San Francisco to Newfoundland when you are heading south? Roling with the riders is a lot of fun but I'm most often either way ahead or behind them or far behind. A normal day on the road is about 6 hours with lots of stops for photos and snacks. My shortest ride was 40 miles, my longest 120.

About 75% through each day the lunch van has set up a lunch with sandwiches snaks and fruits. Lunch is often a quick but never a trivial affair. If you mix short day and a beautiful lunch spot things can last a while. Conversation usually revolves around how many kilometers until the next climb, how far away the next camp is and how many snakes will crawl through. The further away the next camp and the higher the next climb the more subdued things become.

Once in camp I set up my gear and assist with the kitchen and sorting out the dinner and lunch vans, once   a few formalities are taken care of I grab a beer and relax with the riders or set off to take more photos. A lot of my time is spent socializing and seeing how everyone is doing, 98% everyone is doing great.

Dinner is always outstanding, I would need an entire blog post to discrib to you just half of how great dinners are. Chicken, steak, avocado dishes and every fresh fruit and vegetable California can dish out and that's in the hundreds. I'm going to make Indian food for everyone within a day or two (with the supervision of the chef/my boss I'll keep you posted...

Around 7:30 we all go to bed and the party animals that drank too much beer stay up until 7:55.

I'm most certainly leaving out a lot of details. If anyone out there in blogland has a question or blog theme in mind, I'll pay you for it when I get home, I'm a bit lean on ideas these days.