QUICK STATS

Today was a rest day!  Yay!!

When we woke up this morning, Carla's thermometer said it was just 45 degrees outside - brr!  We were grateful to have slept inside.

Our first order of business for the day was, of course, food.  After some yummy oatmeal, we started washing our clothes.  We only wash our clothes once a week, and by the end of the week, they are pretty disgusting.  I'm surprised things don't start growing in them sometimes!!  One of my bike shirts already has a bunch of orange-ish/brown-ish stains on it by the neck, armpits and front zipper.  I think it must be a mixture of sweat, sunscreen, and road grime....ewwww.  Anyway, needless to say, I was very happy to wash our clothes.

While the clothes were going, Nathan and I took everything out of our panniers and set them around Carla's yard to dry in the sun. We also hung all of our bags on her clothes line. It looked kind-of funny to see her clothesline full of bags, not clothes.  In the end, Nathan said it best when he said "it looks like we exploded all over her yard".

Then Carla showed us some really interesting photos and told us about her life and childhood.  She grew up at a ski lodge that her parents owned.  She spent a lot of time skiing and was even in some skiing photo shoots and ads.  We looked at pictures of the ads and the ski lodge in a photo album she had - it was so cool.

In 1976, her parents used the ski lodge to help train the bicyclists for the first cross-country trip on the TransAmerica Trail with the Adventure Cycling Association (ACA)!  The TransAmerica Trail is part of the route we're using on our trip.  How cool is that?!

Then, in 1980, Carla took a 1,400 mile trip with ACA up into Canada.  Now she gardens and does massage, but she said that she thinks she would really like to open a Hostel someday.  I think she'd be great at it!

When the laundry was done and we had finished looking at her pictures, we put on our clean clothes and looked online for all the places that we needed to go to run our rest-day errands: pizza place, bike store, grocery store, and free wi-fi.  We found them all in walking-distance of each other.  Perfect!

You can probably guess where we went first: PIZZA!  It was a buffet, and for $5 each, we stuffed our faces.  We are pretty sure we each ate the equivalent of a whole large pizza.  Kind of gross, kind of awesome!  One cool thing about this pizza place is that there were bicycles hanging from the ceiling.  I think there were at least 30 bikes all together!

Then we went to the bike store, because we needed new helmets.  And why did we need new helmets, you ask?  No, we didn't get in a crash.  Remember when we got all the rain, and our stuff got soaked, and our nice neighbors built a fire for us to dry our things around?  Well, one of the wet things we dried was our helmets....but apparently we didn't keep a very close eye on them, because they not only dried, they started melting!  Here's a picture of the melted and deformed parts.  It's kind-of hard to tell what's wrong without having a 'before' picture..but trust us, we needed new ones.

Nathan and I discovered that both of our helmets were a little melted and mis-shapen just the other day, and it was a priority to get new helmets at the first town we came to.  In a way, it worked out kind-of well, because we currently had dark colored helmets, and we have been talking about wanting to get brighter colored ones.  So now we could get bright colors!

So we walked into the bike store and found lots of bright colored helmets, but the cheapest ones were about $50 each! Eek!  So we didn't buy any there.  

Our next stop was a coffee shop, but when we got to it, it was only as big as a snow-cone stand, so we knew there would be no wi-fi there.

On our way to the grocery store, we saw an ace hardware.  We stopped in to get a screen repair to fix all the holes in our tent screen.  They didn't have what we were looking for, so we left.

Feeling bummed, we spotted another potential wi-fi hot spot - a book store with a coffee shop in it.  To our delight, they had wi-fi!  Finally finding some success, we each ordered a yummy drink and settled in for a few hours of blog updating.  Nathan got a chocolate-raspberry frappe, and I got a green tea/ginger frappe.  We got a lot done, but as usual, not as much as we had hoped.  It seems that our blog takes a LOT more time to update and manage than either of us had thought.  Of course, this might also be because many of the things we wanted to put on our blog, we had hoped to have done before we left (packing lists, formatting, etc..), but we did not have time to get to.

We were content with our progress, so we headed back to Carla's and planned to ask her for a ride to Wal-Mart to look for some cheaper bike helmets.  Shortly after we got back though, her friend Cynthia arrived.  Carla and Cynthia had been planning to go out to a local brewery tonight to hang out and talk.  We asked if Carla had time to take us to look for helmets before she left, and she and Cynthia decided to change their plans, take us to Wal-Mart, and buy some beer there. We felt bad, but they assured us it was OK.  How nice of them!!

At Wal-Mart, they got their beer, and we found good, brightly colored helmets for $20 each.  Horray!  Then we all headed home, Carla built another fire, and we enjoyed each other's company for a few hours while the stars came out.  We had a really great conversation about God, relationships, money, dreams, and nature.  It felt good to connect so meaningfully even though we all just met each other.  Here's a picture of Nathan and I by the fire in Carla's backyard.

Carla let us sleep in her living room again (I told her we were getting spoiled).

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