Leg 2 has begun!

Today marks the first day of our second leg of the tour. We left San Diego en route to Austin. This is also the first day that lenora has returned to us and will be joining us for like 3 weeks or something.

We sort of got off to a late start today and never really got it together. We had to run a few last minute errands and do a few last minute tune ups on lenoras bike early on in the day as we were heading out of San Diego. Our goal was to do about 61 miles today to get to live oak springs, which typically if we leave at noon is doable, however today's ride was literally all up hill. I don't know if you who is reading this read any of our earlier posts about the west coast ride... But i said we had reached our highest elevation of the trip at some point. Basically I straight up lied to your faces because that wasn't even close. I was reading the elevation charts wrong for the southern tier. Today we were supposed to climb 4500 ft in 60 miles. Pretty insane.

With that said, our pace for the day was much slower than usual going about 6 mph a lot of the time. So that + leaving late + running lots of errands and shit lead to us only making it about 32 miles to alpine. According to other blogs we have read, people typically only make it to alpine. However, we feel that we are ragers and were hoping to have gone about double. Oops!

As it turned out we did actually make it just outside of alpine. However, we have new problems with this new leg of the tour. None of the camp sites have hiker biker spots now that we have left the west coast. OOF! This means camp sites are much more expensive for us in most cases so we have to either end our days much earlier and figure out a place to stay with plenty of daylight to find a good hidden camp spot... Or we have to go to camp sites after their office is closed so we can sneak in and leave before anyone finds us and starts asking for money. There is also a third option which I will get to later, but the moral of the story is that we have to think a little harder about our night to night sleeping arrangements.

So yeah, with all of that said, it gets even more tricky when we don't make it to wherever we planned to make it because the stops we mapped out in the beginning were sort of chosen with some sort of accomodations in mind. Which leaves us with what happened today haha. So there we were at 5:30 realizing there was no way we were making it to live oak springs before sun down and we didn't know what the hell we were going to do. We called around to some camp grounds, but they were all too expensive. The only motel / hotel options were priced outrageously. We decided our best option was to try and find some place to camp off the road where we would hopefully not get spotted. The problem then was that we were in a pretty rural area and that really left us with no place to do that.

At this point I was getting pretty cranky and giving up hope and didn't want to deal with the situation anymore. Lenora then stepped up and feuded she would go up to someones house and ask if we could sleep in their yard. This is an idea I have thought about trying a few times on this trip, however I have little to know faith in humanity so I always abandon the idea. Lucky for us, we went up the first driveway we saw and happened to find a very nice old married couple who were more than happy to let us stay in their yard. Before Lenora even finished asking the guy cut her off and said the yard is ours. He even offered us his shower, brought us a couple gallons of water, showed us where we could charge our phones. Truly amazing and I couldn't believe it worked out so easily on the first try.

We then set up our tents in the yard and Lenora whipped out all of the fancy cooking gear she brought and made us a good hot meal which actually filled me up for the first time on this trip. Well done Lenora. It is really nice to have her back with us as a 3rd personality to the group. Zach and I get along just as well as always, but having another person helps mix it up a bit more. Also, a third person helps a lot in decision making haha. No more 50/50 decisions. We can actually have a "vote" of sorts. It also helps in evening conversations to have a third person hehe.

Ok ok, I am just rambling in my tent in this dudes yard at this point! Tomorrow we are going to try to make up for lost time by taking advantage of the huge descent that comes along with the huge ascent we have been doing today. We will try to do over 100 miles tomorrow! We shall see if we can pull it off, but our descent is pretty sick so I think we can probably do it. The first portion of the day is going to be finishing up the ascent we didn't conquer today though. WE WILL CRUSH!!!!!!!!

Ps. The photo of the day is of a freshly opened goober. Enjoy.