Laurabelle's Blog

This weekend Jeff rode in Waves to Wine 2007: 155 miles from San Francisco to Lake Sonoma, biked over two days. I did not ride, but I went along and volunteered.

Jeff left the apartment at 6am in order to get to San Francisco in time for the 6:30am start. I stayed behind and went to work as usual but left at 11am for Sonoma Mountain Village, the overnight stop for Waves to Wine. I had lunch (bean and cheese burrito and an apple) and bummed around waiting for my volunteer shift.

This is where my afternoon started to go downhill. Envious of the people walking around with ice cream sandwiches, I picked one up myself and found that it was unpleasantly cold and hard. (I am used to ice cream sandwiches being nice and soft!) In fact, it was so hard that I broke my lower permanent retainer! I guess it had been going for a while (it was in for ten years), but this was the last straw. Unfortunately, it left a sharp fragment of metal on one tooth, which was pretty painful on my tongue by the time I got home to my dental wax on Sunday.

My volunteer shift in the bike corral started at 3pm. A NMSS staff member was there with me for the first while and then ran off to deal with something else. She came back briefly, then ran off again and never came back. There wasn't really enough work for two people, but I had no one to talk to, it was hot, I was standing around on concrete getting sore, and eventually I really needed to visit a port-o-potty. On the other hand, it was nice to see Jeff right when he rolled in at about 4:30.

Jeff had had a rather more interesting day than I. Back in San Francisco, he turned his head at the wrong time (a co-worker teased him that a really cute biker chick distracted him) and ran straight into a wooden post in the middle of the path. Jeff and his bike went flying (Jeff still attached to the bike thanks to clipless pedals), and he landed upside down on his helmet. Luckily the helmet worked as it was supposed to (yay helmets!), and he escaped with nothing more than a few shallow gashes on the top of his thighs, from the collision with his own bike.

There was a moment when Jeff wondered whether his ride would stop there, but it didn't, and he was fine. $60 poorer for a new bike helmet from a SAG car, he got back on the road.

At the overnight stop, there was much celebrating and beer-drinking from the New Belgium Brewery tent. Jeff and I slunk off to our tent rather early, as we were both tired, and fell asleep in spite of the festivities (which were not actually all that loud).

The next morning, I dutifully got up for my scheduled 5:30am bike corral shift. It was still dark, and only a few bodies were moving. I saw no staff people and no one at all near the bike corral. Still annoyed at my abandonment the previous afternoon, I went back to bed.

Jeff and I got up just after 7am and joined the long line for breakfast. It felt like everyone got breakfast at the same time; then everyone got their bikes and left. By 8:15am, the camp was deserted.

I packed up the gear and stowed it in the car and then waited around for the tent to dry out from the foggy night. I did a few sudoku puzzles and enjoyed my new music player, at least until the batteries ran out. Jeff left at about 8am; the tent was not completely dry until 11am.

Before I left Sonoma Mountain Village, I left a message on Jeff's cell phone to tell him that I would meet him at the finish. There was some doubt on this point, since I had been feeling pretty horrible that morning, and I was thinking of going straight home. I started feeling better after some time in the sun, and I decided that I might as well wait at the finish line instead of at home.

I was scheduled for a volunteer shift loading bikes at 11am, but I didn't arrive until just before noon. That was just as well, since no bikers arrived until noon. I think that if I volunteer again, I will not worry about being late.

Jeff rolled in at about 4:30pm again. We had dinner, and Jeff and his teammates had some of the very last bottles of beer before the tent closed for good. Soon thereafter the wine tent also ran out of wine, and we skedaddled before it got ugly.

Unfortunately, when I tried to put the rack on the car I found that Jeff had carefully forgotten the screws that hold the folding rack at the correct angle. (Oops.) So we ran his bike back to the trucks to be carried back to San Francisco. (Riders who left their cars at the starting point took shuttles back and met their bikes there.) We drove back home, showered and changed, then got back in the car and headed to Giant Stadium to pick up Jeff's bike.

I suppose it is an indicator of our mental state that we actually might have driven directly to San Francisco to get the bike — which would have left us in exactly the same position. It was Jeff who said, twenty miles down the road, Oh, we've got to go home to get the screws! D'oh...

But we got the bike, and it didn't fall off or get hit before we got home, and I remembered not to drive into the garage before Jeff could get it off, so we win.

Next year, if Jeff does this again, we are getting a bigger tent. Our nice little two-man Hubba Hubba is nice for backpacking, but we can afford a little more luxury for car-camping.

At the end of September Jeff and I will be participating in Waves to Wine, a two-day bike tour from San Francisco to the Napa valley to raise funds for the National Multiple Sclerosis society. He will bike; I will volunteer since the idea of my biking ~150 miles is laughable.

Multiple Sclerosis is an important issue for Jeff, since one of his uncles suffered from it for many years and finally died of it last year. I never got to meet this uncle, and I wish I had. It must take amazing strength of character to withstand a disease when you know you will never recover.

The point of this exercise, of course, is to raise money for research and for programs to support people who are currently suffering from MS. I have a personal donation page, and so does Jeff. If you can sponsor us with even a small donation, we would appreciate it.

Yesterday Jeff and I went out to Mount Diablo and hiked the Mitchell Canyon and Eagle Peak loop. We meant to do the hike last weekend but didn’t make it; this week we had better luck.

In fact we had a fairly active weekend. Friday evening was guest night at Berkeley Ironworks, so we invited a co-worker and her fiancé to climb with us. We had planned to have them take a belay safety class, but I ended up teaching them myself, which was rather cool. They passed the test (by BI staff, not me) with flying colors. They seemed to enjoy the climbing too, although it was a bit difficult for them (as things always are when one begins).

That wasn’t enough climbing for me, so we went back Saturday evening. I was perhaps still a bit tired from the evening before, but I nevertheless reached the top of two new 5.6 routes, one of which I had been trying off and on, and another I had never attempted.

And then, of course, we hiked on Sunday.

Jeff and I went hiking yesterday for the first time in an embarrassingly long while. The venue was Donner Canyon, at Mount Diablo State Park. It was a beautiful day and a pretty little loop hike, though not greatly spectacular.

I did get a nice shot of Jeff being majestic in a mountain-climber way.

Jeff, a friend of his, and I made a little trip to Angel Island yesterday. It cost us nearly $40 for transportation (yikes), but Jeff is glad we went. That’s good, because we’re on a strict budget and I’m not so sure it was wise. Oh well, that’ll just be our fun for the month.

Angel Island is in San Francisco Bay, a bit north of Alcatraz and rather larger than that famous island. Angel Island was at times a military base and an internment camp for Chinese immigrants and then WWII prisoners of war; now it’s a California state park. The internment camp at China Cove is undergoing renovation and reconstruction until the end of 2006, so we unfortunately were unable to view the historical information there.

We did take a nice hike around the island, up to the top of Mount Livermore (the highest point on the island, though hardly a mountain), which afforded us lovely views of the surrounding Bay. As we rounded the western side of the island, we watched a sailing race on the water below. I forgot my camera, of course, but Jeff’s friend had his. In fact it may be just as well that I forgot mine, since the friend said several times, I’d take a picture if we weren’t facing into the sun, and then the couple of pictures he did take turned out fuzzy. I guess the day was meant to be remembered, not recorded.

Yesterday afternoon Jeff and I picked up our 2006 Honda Civic Hybrid from the dealership. This was very exciting; although we had technically bought it two weeks ago today, it didn’t actually arrive until this week.

You see, we knew we wanted a hybrid, and I’m not so keen on the newer Priuses. First of all it seems almost impossible to get one without a very long wait, and secondly I just don’t like the body shape. (I like a bit more of a tail on a car.) So we settled on a Civic, especially since they’ve been redesigned this year and are now full hybrids as well as very sexy-looking.

On the first Saturday after we arrived in California, we called up the nearest Honda dealership and said, We want a Civic Hybrid. They said, Can you come in? We could and did, and they sold us the car we wanted, in front of everyone on the waiting list. They had just gotten the VIN numbers (yes I know that’s redundant) for their cars and were starting to call people on the waiting list, but no one was picking up their phones. We called up at the right time, so we got our pick.

The car arrived at the dealership on Wednesday, but we didn’t pick it up immediately because we were having some extra features installed (most importantly a Lo-Jack device, which will greatly facilitate the recovery of the car should it ever be stolen). The dealership called on Friday to say it was ready, and could I pick it up that afternoon at 4:30? I got permission to leave work an hour early, and Jeff and I met at the dealership at the allotted time. We picked up the keys, signed on a few dotted lines, and drove away in our extremely shiny new car.

I say shiny in both a figurative and a literal sense. The color is called alabaster silver metallic; in plain terms it’s a sort of silvery almost-white. The interior is dark blue, and she drives like a dream. Driving is extremely fun, except that I’m terrified of all the California drivers. The number of crumpled quarter-panels around here is rather alarming.

Yesterday evening we drove home in the dusk and parked the car in the garage, then climbed up to our apartment to read the user manual and drool. We wanted to go somewhere but didn’t have anywhere to go. We contented ourselves with planning our Saturday trips.

So early this morning we bought groceries at a few hippie grocery establishments that were too far away for biking and the wrong direction for bussing. (Jeff and I have agreed that using the car for grocery trips once each week is acceptable, but mid-week trips must be on foot, bicycle, or bus.) Then we brought the groceries home, packed lunches, and drove off to Muir Woods National Monument for an afternoon of light hiking.

The driving turned out to be a little more exciting than we had expected; the exit sign for Highway 101 northbound was obscured by graffiti so that we took the wrong fork and had to wind our way through downtown San Francisco in order to find our way back to the Golden Gate Bridge. On the positive side, we got to see a little of San Francisco including the Embarcadero; unfortunately Jeff has decided that he hates downtown San Francisco. It’s too much city for him.

In contrast, our little hike in the Muir Woods was quite lovely. We plowed past the crowds on the Main Trail as fast as we could and turned off onto a side trail, where we spent a couple of hours hiking peacefully among hills, creeks, and coastal redwoods.

I’m glad that it worked out for us to pick up the car on a Friday, because we were able to enjoy the car immediately for the main purpose for which I want the car: getting out of the city and into the woods. We have also made plans to get together with one of Jeff’s longtime friends, who is studying at Stanford. One of the good things about living without a car is that it has given us an appreciation for the circumstances when a car is really useful and also for the times when it is unnecessary and wasteful.

I wish I could live like Dorothea and simply not own a car, but Flexcar hasn’t expanded to where I live yet, and I need to be able to get out of the city and hike. I do mean need; hiking is the only activity I have found that clears my mind completely of outside concerns. When I’m out on the trail, no matter how much stress I have at work or in life, the only thing on my mind is putting one foot in front of the other.