Thursday, April 22, 2010

Disaster strikes v2.0

Aye aye aye. So this morning we actually left at a decent time. Got up
after a good nights rest in our king sized hotel bed, hit the road by
like 9:45 or some shit. We rode for a couple of hours through hazy ass
weather in about the most boring setting known to man kind. All we
could see were fields filled with various crops as far as the eye
could see. Everything was flat, the sky was grey, the ground was wet,
the air was thick and moist. Boring as shit. Then we pulled up to one
of the most depressing looking towns I think I have ever seen, called
Guadalupe, which was just filled with red knecks (which I didn't even
know existed in California). I seriously thought I was back in Ohio
but worse. I also finalu understood why gay posi bills never get
passed in California and why Arnold Schwarzenegger is the governer
(though I would have had to have votes foe him myself). All of the
towns we have been passing through the past couple of days seem to be
filled with ass holes.

Anyway, we got through Guadalupe then made a couple huge climbs back
in to the mountains which had no pay off views whatsoever. Just climbs
up in to tired ass scenery.

After descending to the bottom of the valley we stopped or lunch at
lompoch where we were greated with the highlight of the day... They
have avocados at their subways! That shit made our day.

So after that we were riding with anticipation for a long ass time as
we were expecting the final, and highest, ascent of our trip. It felt
like it was never going to come... Then I got a flat tire. Womp womp.I
checked out the tube and tire and saw no obvious reason why the flat
would have happened so I was a little nervous as I put a new tube and
took off again. My nerves were on point as, two miles later, my shit
was all droopy all over again. Now I was a bit frustrated. However! I
had one of those stupid 99 cent presta converter bullshits on my tube
end and guess what!? Somehow it was on so tight I could remove it even
with pliers. This meant I couldn't even remove the tube from my rim to
put on another one.

The first thing I tried was just ripping the tube off the stem to see
if I could just pop the stem out of the hole. Unfortunately tube
designers were too smart for me to simply do that because there is a
nice little base that keeps the tube from slipping through. Zach and I
then struggled some more trying to loosen the attachment to no avail.
At this point I was starting to panic and thought we were stranded and
would have to hitch a ride or something as we were in the middle of
nowhere. Then I calmed down a bit and decided to use some wire cutters
to destroy the stopped on the end of the base. After chipping away at
it for about 15 minutes I still couldn't pull the damn thing out so we
used an Allen wrench and my bike lock to hammer it out. The shit
really sucked.

So anyway, I then put in another new tube. Rode 2 miles. FLAT! I got
pist again. Took everything apart. Examined the tire, rim, tube...
Everythig. Nothing was wrong! I still don't know what the hell was
going on. At this point we were out of spare tubes. Luckily I bought a
patch kit a few days ago so we patched up one of the bad tubes and put
it back in hoping somehow the problem would fix itself. It seemed to
have done just that as we managed to make it the rest of the ride flat
free. I am crossing my fingers that we can make it to Santa Barbra
tomorrow with no flats and get some new tubes.

With all of that said... The hill we were waiting all day for never
seemed to show up haha. Either we climbed it and didn't realize
because of all the tire bullshit, or we are justn pure animals and are
completely unphased by mountains. We definitely raged on the descent
though because we got to blast through the last 4 miles of the day in
about 10 minutes to pull up to the camp ground at gaviota state park.

All in all, though the day sucked, we rode like 65 miles or something
through the mountains and we made it to the end of US 1. We will miss
you US 1. We shared so much time with you over the past week. How
unfortunate that you got so ugly and boring during your last leg.

So yeah, feels good to be in my tent! Tomorrow we are off to ventura
and the next day LA where we will be chillin hard for 4 days due to
our crushing stamina allowing us to plow down the coast. It better be
warm there. This cold weather bullshit has got to go.

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