Day 19

Unprotected by darkness, I stumbled out of my tent and was greeted by a steady steam of traffic along with construction workers. Crap. Yesterday was easy, since there weren't any actual workers out. As I was packing up, I noticed that my back tire was a bit soft. No problem, I'll just pump it up a bit. When I was a kid, we had these spectacular little toys called stomp rockets. You would load up  a rocket onto a tube, then stomp on an air filled container, blasting that air into the rocket, sending it flying. This is exactly what happened to my pump. I'm really glad I didn't hit myself in the eye or something. The pump easy screwed back together. The construction wasn't too scary. I just stayed on my shoulder, then when the cars had to ride there, I moved to the closed lane. Eventually I had to stop because there was a truck in front of me (in the closed lane). I didn't want to haut pass him, so I peddled to the other side of the road- just a thin strip on the other side of the yellow line. Luckily the other lane opened up and I was able to cross over again. This was just a long day of freeway. Towards the end of the day, another construction zone took away my shoulder, so I crossed over onto the part of the road you weren't supposed to be on. It was quite a lot of miles, but it was all downhill. I finally made it to my third host, Henry and Lisa. Even though it was pretty late, they fed me more food than I could eat and we shared stories-Henry is incredibly knowledgable about bicycling and has done some amazing stuff- biking hundreds of miles with very little sleep, for example. When I was finally stuffed, I went to my bedroom- the walls had trees painted on them and the bed was huge and comfortable. I slept like a baby.