Day 3 -- Sacramento, CA to Auburn, CA

Miles: 52.18

Total Miles: 195.68

Time: 3:38

Average Speed: 14.3 mph

Max Speed: 29.7 mph

Flats Today: 0

Total Flats: 0

Elevation Gain: 2770 ft

Weather: Warm and sunny again around 80 degrees

We started out the day by riding about a mile to breakfast, then we continued onto a bikepath. The bikepath was very curvy and well marked. The path had short rolling hills, which caused me to get car sick, or should I say, bike sick. All I had to do to fix it was slow down my blazing speed. The path took us through some nice wooded areas, then we followed a river for quite some time. We were cruising along, and we came upon some nice views of the water, so we took some pictures. Not too long after that, we came upon about 7 deer that weren't that far from the path, so we took some more pictures. We're not going to post those because I'm sure everyone's seen a deer. Just a few curves later, we saw 3 male turkeys, and they all had huge beards, so we took even more pictures. Then, we kept riding and found a cool dam to take a picture by, so once again, we took a picture. This time we were riding with the 6 foot eight guy, so we got one with him. He is so tall!! Eventually the mountains in the distance came into sight, so we started thinking about the infamous day 4 again. That got our mind out of picture taking and into anticipation for the next day.

Before we realized it, we were at the sag stop 33 miles in. When we got there, we were talking to some guys and we asked them about the mountains in the distance. They replied "Those aren't the mountains, those are just hills." Wow, those things were huge, and they were just hills. We decided to take a picture at the sag stop with the beautiful lake and the "hills" in the background. Yeah, those mountains you see in the background are just hills. We ate some amazingly delicious strawberries at the sag stop as well. They had two kinds of strawberries we could eat from, juicy ones or sweet ones. They asked us to try one of each and see if we could guess which one was which... Wade, the fruit nerd he is, guessed it in 2 seconds. We were both sitting there chowing down on the fruit, and the other people kept suggesting that we try some of the other food. We might not be the best riders in the group, but we're the best fruit eaters.

We headed out from the sag stop, which we did stay at awhile to eat those free strawberries, and found our way into some rolling hills. After about 12 miles on the rolling hills, we hit one of those hills that we thought was a mountain. Now that we've done that one, we realized that we like the climbs at the beginning of the day because we're not so tired. We climbed straight up for 1.4 miles. When we reached the top and quit breathing so hard, we saw some real mountains out in the distance. We zoomed in and took a picture, which if you look at close enough at, you can see a snow capped mountain. We'll be climbing that tomorrow!!!

They told us to just learn to endure the pain... that doesn't sound so good. I guess we'll be doing a lot of enduring tomorrow. We would have added more today, but we're scared shitless for tomorrow.

Here's just a little info on what we're going to encounter tomorrow on the highly talked about Day 4: Almost 9,000 feet of climb, which is the most of any day... more than the Rockies. 77 miles, which is a very large amount when you're climbing all day. Some great views while on the Sierra Nevadas. And if we make it up to the top of the mountains, a chance of snow!!!