June 5 Day 2 in San Francisco

We woke up and ate a nice continental breakfast at the hotel, tuned up the bikes, went on a test ride with them, then oiled them up. Once we felt as if our bikes were good to go, we headed out with Ken to see more on San Francisco. We first went to see the steepest straight hill and steepest curved hill in downtown San Francisco. We have videos for both of those, but Wade hasn't figured out how to edit their length and get them on the blog yet, and notice how I said Wade. Anyway, we'll try to get those on the blog tomorrow. Next we went to see if the Golden Gate Bridge was less foggy today, but it wasn't. We got one picture from a distance where you can see the top of the bridge, but that's it.

We did get a pretty good picture of Alcatraz though.

Then we went to my favorite part of San Francisco... The sea lions on the docks. It was a blast to watch them push each other off then swim around and fight to get back on. We could have watched it all day. They were extremely entertaining, but I guess it doesn't take much to entertain an engineer.

We went back to the hotel and Fr. Ken celebrated mass in our hotel room. It was quite an extraordinary experience to have a one on one mass... We actually had to pay attention to Ken for an hour. I'm just kidding though because he did us a huge favor. We were able to make it to the orientation stuff that we would have missed if it wasn't for his kindness.

We got to meet everyone on the trip. There were 29 riders on the trip plus 5 guides. There were 8 women and the rest were retired old men who will kick our butts up the hills. Wade was the youngest although there were two people pretty close to him. One 20 year old girl and one 23 year old guy who's six foot eight and played basketball at a division one college. WOW. There were a lot of men around my age, but of course they all look older.

After that, we got the route information for tomorrow and ate dinner at a Mexican restaurant with everyone. There are some pretty interesting people on this trip, and a lot of them seem like cool people to be around for 52 days. Tomorrow we say goodbye to San Francisco and hello to the rest of America. Oh, by the way Matt, we noticed a lot of people in San Francisco wearing polos.