Monday, August 13, 2012

The flat tire day

8/12 Day 32 (Second Half) - After we had everything taken care of at McDonalds we headed for Santa Barbara.

We stopped first at Old Mission Santa Barbara. It's this big mission that sits up on a hill overlooking the town. It was really pretty, but the tours were $5 so we skipped the tour and just hung out outside. (Skye talked to Nonnie on the phone for a solid 30 mins here. It was a much needed break in the shade. -Ethan) After that we went to the courthouse which was built a very long time ago (not sure of the exact year, look it up if you want to know). Anyway, they still use the courthouse for normal courthouse stuff but the public is allowed to tour through most of it. There is also a tower that you're allowed to tour as well. We decided to check out the tower. It was pretty cool and you could see almost all of Santa Barbara.

After we left the courthouse we stopped briefly at an old fort, not sure what it was called (El Presidio -E) but I was done looking at old stuff by then so we just looked for a minute. After that we headed to REI for some needed equipment replacements. They pretty much let you take anything back there if you're dissatisfied so we returned my Camelbak and got a new one in purple. We also returned our sporks that broke a few days ago for new ones and bought two new tubes in case we have any more flat tires. Fingers crossed that doesn't happen again. I think Ethan would lose it. :]

We left Santa Barbara and still had about 30 more miles. We biked through a couple towns and finally came to this bike path Ethan wanted to take. When we got to it we realized it wasn't paved. Usually we don't mess with unpaved paths because they're difficult to ride on with heavy bikes. But this one seemed really compacted and not too bumpy so we decided to take it anyway. Wrong choice. It ended up being super bumpy and it sucked. We even had to take our bikes over train tracks. I was not happy. It finally smoothed out near the end, but we were still happy to be off of it when it finally did end.

We eventually had to get back on HWY 1 which always sucks, but the shoulder was good the whole way so that makes us feel better. At one point the highway is squeezed between the ocean and the mountains and there is actually a bike lane on it. It was pretty neat and really pretty.

We decided that since we wouldn't need dinner food the next day to just eat out before we got to the campground. We found a place that had pizza a few miles before the campground in Ventura. After we ate we went to the grocery store for some Oreos then biked a little less than 3 miles to McGrath State Beach. There was only one other biker there (we didn't catch his name). He had been riding for 7 months. Wow! That's a long time. We talked to him for a while and then set up camp. It was a pretty uneventful night. We went to bed super early so we could get up at the butt crack of dawn and get on our way to LA.

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