Thursday evening I arrived in San Francisco. After a 6 hour flight, the first thing I wanted to do, besides getting up and running laps around the parking garage, was to get something to eat. Knowing that we needed a good food choice to kick off our training, we chose to stop at In and Out Burger. Out mealed looked about like this:

Yum. But really, my stomach had a hard time handling that food after going over half a day without eating anything substantial.

After getting a strained 5 hours of sleep, we woke up and drove around Santa Cruz, getting a feel for a couple of the climbs we wanted to do in the next week. Finally, our bikes came in Friday evening and we unboxed and assembled them. Aside from my cheap frame pump mount, there were no casualties to report.

Santa Cruz has a markedly different culture than most of where I’ve been on the East Coast. It seems like people are a little more laid back and more fit than the average person back home. The infrastructure accommodates for bikes really well, with bike lanes on all the major roads through town, even pressure plates to trip the traffic lights IN the bike lanes.

A whole lot of people ride around town on their bikes and that’s pretty cool to see. But man there are a lot of hipsters. It’s just a polar opposite of what I’m used to seeing in Newark (and especially Maryland).

It’s been great so far, we’ve done about 5 hours of riding with 4 more hours planned today. I’ll post more about the riding around Santa Cruz maybe with some GoPro footage throughout the week.