Today was one of those hard days. I wasn't even sure I'll make it all the way!
Let's start from the beginning. I set out by 8:00 AM. By the time I stopped for lunch, I had done 45 miles. I was feeling great. Most of the trail until then was flat, and 20 miles or so from Sacramento to Folsom was on a really nice, shady bike trail. Little did I know about what was coming next. At the 116 mile mark, a hill came up. Pretty tough, but I made it. I was looking forward to the downhill, but it never came. The rest of the 15 miles were really hard. It was 2:00 PM when I started the climb. The sun was blazing hot and the road had heated up too. Pretty much all of that stretch was on the highway, so no chance of shade either. I was creeping up at a constant 4mph pace. I overheated multiple times and went through a good 5L of water. After many hours of toiling, I finally rolled into my second WarmShowers stay at 6:30 PM. That's 4.5 hours for 25 miles! Oh well. I'm done now. Peter, my host, gave me a nice Mac and cheese and veggie dinner. I was also able to take some pictures along the way. Tomorrow is a lot more climbing - 4255 ft up as opposed to 2785 ft today. But it's only 35 miles, so just a lot of climbing. My plan is to lose some luggage (my heavy jacket and some smaller things) and leave early so I can get to the campground by lunch.
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Got through my first day! It was so good to be back on the bike after a while. I felt great through most of the trip. The only real problem was the heat. I didn't check the temperature, but it felt really hot all through the ride. All exposed parts of my skin now hurt. Need to take better care of that!
The route was quite nice. I tried navigation with Google maps and it worked really well. It suggested a slightly different route than the ACA maps - shorter and through smaller roads with a lot of turns, but the voice navigation guided me beautifully through all of it. I think I'll use this more often now, wherever I have internet. I must say a few words about warmshowers and my hosts. TL;DR they're both awesome! I am staying with Martin and Ashlin tonight and they are both lovely people. We had a lot of fun talking about previous bike trips and they gave me a ton of great advice on the TransAm route ( part of which they did last year). After a nice shower, they made me a delicious pasta dinner and we spoke about our lives, careers and interests. They also had similar glowing reviews of warmshowers hosts that they stayed with during their trips. Overall, it's a huge help for travelling cyclists to be able to meet likeminded people en route and get a nice shower and bed for the night. Tomorrow seems like it'll be much of the same - flatish farmlands and high temperatures. One more day of seasoning before the long hard climb to Lake Tahoe! Just left uncle's place. I don't think what I'm about to do has still fully sunk in. I stayed up pretty late last night, getting everything in order. Still, I was up by 6:00 AM today. In general I feel pretty good. My bike is very back-heavy, and that's a little troubling, but everything seems to be packed up nice and compact, so that's nice.
Today is going to be a lot of commute - 1 hour on the Caltrain and 1 on the ferry. After that it's a 4-5 hour ride to Davis where I'll stay with my first Warmshowers host! Should be fun :) |
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