"Nervous Helps Nothing"

 Our quote of the day is from William at Rooster Bicycles.  Maybe it will be our quote of the trip.

Today started out with me driving to Salinas (about 25 minutes away) to get a hitch for the bike rack installed on the car. I decided to layout a short 30 mile route to ride and follow it with the navigation app on my Garmin. We are going to be using the Garmin navigation feature for the Bay 2 Bay and I have used it a lot in checking rides for the Ocean State Tour de Cure. 

I didn't concentrate on remembering the route and didn't print a cue sheet as a back up. The start was pretty funny. I feel like I made about 16 U-turns in the 1st mile to try and get on the course. I was worried that someone in the neighborhood I was riding around was going to call the police and complain about a stalker. 

When I finally got going, I found that the navigation app seems to pick weird times to give you a cue and when not to give you a cue. Twice I came to T intersections and the Garmin didn't give me a hint, so I had to go to the map and figure out where to go. Of course when I was on a 5 mile straight away with no possible turns, the Garmin would tell me to bear to the left or right depending upon which way the road was slightly turning. I had a good laugh.

For about 10 miles of the ride I was on our route for the first day. Every other time I have ridden that stretch I have had a tailwind. Today I had a headwind.

On the way back, I started getting texts from Thom. It looks like he is not making it out here today. He may end of spending the night in Dallas/Ft Worth. There is still a chance he will make his connection. If he does, he won't land here until after 9:00 PM or Midnight on the East Coast. 

The hitch was installed by the official trailer hitch installers of the Bay 2 Bay Bike Ride, Johnson Associates of Salinas. I don't think I mentioned that we bought a new car to replace the 17 year old car we were planning on taking on the trip. After I put the rack in the hitch and the bike on the rack, I called Claudia to say I would be home in 25 minutes. Then I spent about 5 to 10 minutes trying to figure out how to get the car to back up with the hitch on. We have that great safety feature that automatically stops the car if something is behind you. I couldn't figure out how to turn it off. Hopefully the people inside of Johnson and Associates were watching and had a good laugh. It was really funny. I am still not sure what initials it was to turn off that safety feature. 

It's been nice to hear from friends and Tour de Cure members who will be meeting us along the way. I have a feeling from somewhere near Cleveland until the end of the ride, we will be joined by people we know and people we don't know for some part of each day. 

By the way, if you are on Strava, you can follow Thom and I and see all the details of our daily rides.

Only 3 more days and the planning will be over and ride will begin!