DAY ONE - Sacramento, CA - YWCA women's shelter.

DAY ONE. I can't believe we're finally off, but we are! After several days of preparation at Half Moon Bay, south of San Francisco, this morning we got up at 4 am (3 am with daylight savings - gross!), loaded our bikes onto the roof racks of our rental vans, and headed to a park just at the base of the Golden Gate Bridge to start this voyage from with our rear tires dipped in the waters of the Pacific Ocean. NBC news for the SF Bay Area showed up to do a live feed, so hopefully thousands of people in the area remembered the time change far enough in advance to be up and about for the morning news ... but it was only 7 am, and a Sunday, no less, so who knows?


Today's route was originally supposed to be 100 miles, or a "century" as cyclists call it, but in order to meet up with a group of high schoolers who had put together their own Ride for World Health here in Sacramento, and also to avoid being pancaked on the narrow-shouldered bridges linking San Fran to the East Bay area, we put in a short 10 mile stretch across the Golden Gate Bridge and down along the coast of Sausalito, then loaded up and drove over to Davis so we'd still get some riding in before Sac-town. One of the hilarious and notable moments of the day was that only a mile or so into our route from Davis, our bike trail linked with another being used for a triathlon on the Davis campus, and we confused their orange route arrows for our own (also orange). Pretty soon we found ourselves approaching a group of people lining the bike trail, blasting music, clapping, and facing... the other direction. Yep, we were on the tri course headed the wrong way. Luckily, we didn't take out any of the bikers or runners and eventually got re-oriented.

When we finally got to Old Sacramento (battling a pretty fierce headwind the whole way), we met up with the high schoolers and rode back about 17 mile with them to their high school, where we talked to them about Partners in Health. They'd arranged a potluck for us and it was quite enjoyable. I met the coolest high school junior and it reminded me how incredible kids are and how much we ALL need mentors.

This group has awesome dynamics, and maybe I'll backtrack at some point to talk about the first couple days, but suffice it to say that everyone on the team has a stellar outlook and a huge heart, and I feel absolutely euphoric about the whole situation, even though we're running on low sleep and working pretty hard. The weather's supposed to be awful tomorrow (California's getting record precipitation), and we have a 4,000 foot climb in the last 20 miles of our route, which should be fun times. Several feet of SNOW are predicted for Tuesday, so we're trying to beat the storm by driving to our next destination, Carson City, Nevada after we finish riding tomorrow. Thus we technically will have had some discontinuity in our cross-country trek, but admittedly, the biking is more of a gimmick to get people to pay us some attention so we can spread the word about global health issues and really get some good dialogue going about what we all can do. I have to be up in another 6 or 7 hours, so I'm off to finally get in a shower and sleep! I'll hopefully have a chance to get some photos downloaded when we get to Carson City. Thanks for all your support! Much love from the "Sunshine State".