USA-Ride Diary

      Wow - it has been a wee while again since we last put some updates on here. Well we are currently waiting at Lake Tahoe for a few days to delay our arrival in to San Francisco. I guess this is a better position to be in, rather than riding like crazy to make it in time. Before we made it to Tahoe though, we took in some long days through the West of Nevada. We took in another day of well over 100 miles, which took us through some salt lakes and through some incredibly empty landscapes. It was a shock to the eyes to reach the small town of Genoa, where greenery suddenly re-appeared and it looked like people could actually live there! It was nice to sit down with some ice cream and food while the Pauls travelled on to Tahoe to check out the camping situation. Owen and Liz made their best efforts to crash the local wedding, but to no avail…anything for a free meal now!
Perhaps the most bizarre things we have seen since crossing Nevada, was a solitary tree completely covered in pairs of shoes. The tree didn’t appear to belong to anywhere…50 miles from the nearest place. There must have been several hundred pairs in total. Having travelled to America with only a pair of flip-flops, I was excited about the possibility of finding a nice new pair for my weary feet…Unfortunately none of them fitted.
Trying to convey the scale of this place is very hard. We met a guy called Jack at one of our numerous summits who has been working and living in the area for many years. When we asked which way his nearest neighbour was, rather than an immediate response, it was suggested that it was most likely West of where we were at the time, and about 30 miles, if not more until we would go past there! This really is a big open place!
But we are currently sat on the Western side of that space, on the border of Nevada and California - the last of the states we are crossing on this journey. Tomorrow we will continue with our progress West, heading through Placerville, Sacramento, and Vallejo on route to San Francisco. We left route 50 (thankfully) once it started to become much more busy. At times it equated to riding on the motorway back home, but thankfully we avoided too many horns as we spent a little time on the ‘cycle path’ at the side of the road.
But for the remainder of today, we will head out, as many sportspeople do, to the golf course, for a relaxing time before the journey continues bright an early in the morning. Now, by golf I don’t mean anything too strenuous…this involves playing through the monkey’s legs, past the 12 foot snake, through the waterfall and down through the volcano to the uneven green where we will then spend far too many shots trying to “taap it in.” What are rest days for?!
Due to very small time limits in all the libraries which we manage to find, we have been unable to get many pictures up on to the site. In just a few days we will be in San Francisco where we will track down a computer which doesn’t have such a limit placed on it! We will then endeavor to get more of our pictures up on here. Sorry that we haven’t been able to do it all that regularly.