We made it!

Wow. I made it. We did it! We biked almost 4,000 miles, from Baltimore to San Francisco! It's kind of shocking and just feels bizarre.

The last couple of days were eventful as usual. The day from Diamond Springs into Stockton was a pretty exciting day. We had some nice descents, as we needed to drop from about 1,500 feet in elevation to just above sea level. It was weird going through towns and seeing the elevation at 50 feet, when it seems like just yesterday that we never went below 7,000. Our first water stop was after a very nice descent at a place called "Strawberry Market." I had some delicious banana chocolate pie there. The rest of the ride was very scenic, as we biked through vineyards and orchards. It was weird seeing the vineyards because they were very shiny and sparkly. Apparently, they put tinsel in with the grapes to keep the birds away. Upon arrival, the excitement continued! We got to go swimming in a churchmember's pool and then there was a journalist at the church that I spent a while talking to. She said she would have an article about us in an upcoming issue. Then it was a team member's birthday! It's 4k tradition to throw cake in the face of anyone who's birthday it is, so as someone approached her with the cake, the girl was backing away, knowing full well what was coming. However, out of nowhere, five team members pulled out cans of silly string and emptied them on her, creating a huge mess. No one saw it coming. Finally, the most interesting thing about this church is that they brew their own beer. How strange is that? They gave everyone on the team a free bottle. I tried some of the stout, but there was also an apricot beer that sounded interesting.

The next day, our final real riding day, was another interesting day. We had been planning on staying at China Camp State Park, but the park does not allow organizations to stay there and one of the kids on the team accidentally slipped that we were from an organization, so we had to find a new place to stay on very short notice. Fortunately, one of the girls from our team is from Mill Valley, a really lovely town very close to where we were originally going. Her dad is involved in the Boy Scout troop there and got them to lend us there scout hall for two nights. My final ride was with a really fun group and we made it just as night was falling in the lovely city of Richmond. (We got a late start to the day). We passed some cops surrounding a car with guns, telling the people inside to come out with their hands up.

On our day off, we had a barbeque with any families in the area down at Stinson Beach, which was really beautiful. I was joined by several aunts, uncles, and cousins (Ellen, Mary, Dave, Sam, Cerena, Angela, and Tony). It was really nice to see family and I had a great time hanging out with them on the beach. Cerena and Tony were even brave enough to go into the very chilly water!

The next morning was very bittersweet. On the one hand, it was superexciting because we knew we were finishing our 63 day ride, but it was really sad because it was over. We only had a 13 mile ride, so I had some time in the morning to go out to breakfast with a couple team members at a really nice little breakfast place. Then our team spent a very hectic hour or two trying to clean out the vans and figure out what to keep, what to toss, and who to return all the random things in the vans to. Then finally we had our final morning circle, made our final riding dedications, and did our cheer. And off we biked. There was a very nice bike path that went from Mill Valley all the way to the bridge. It was nice to be able to relax while riding instead of biking through what looked like some very trafficky roads. And then the bridge! It was really amazing biking over the Golden Gate Bridge, knowing that we had come all the way from Baltimore to do it. The view was amazing (It wasn't as foggy as I have heard it can get). It was very windy though, which made me very thankful that we had our own bike lane, separated by a wall from the cars, so we weren't blown into traffic. Our final miles were down along the beach at Chrissy Field. We passed by the three guys we met from Brown biking across the country at their own celebration, right along to some tables with food from the American Cancer Society. I was joined again by my Barry aunts and uncles for some food and a short ceremony. We dipped our front tires in the Pacific Ocean, to parallel the dipping of our back tires in the Atlantic in Baltimore. And then the team went for a quick celebratory dip in the water, which wasn't actually that cold.

The team then went our separate ways for a couple hours. I went to Pier 39 with the family and rode the carousel and saw a whole lot of sea lions. The sea lions were really cool! There were tons of them just chilling on the docks there. And then I joined my team for a final team dinner. We went to a great restaurant in Ghiradelli Square. It was a delicious meal, for which I am extremely thankful to a girl on the team's father for covering the cost of everyone there without family. Saying goodbye to the team at the end of the meal was extremely hard. I've spent 24 hours a day with them for two months and now it will be quite a while before I see most of them. They're a really good group of people that I will miss a lot. I expected before this trip that arriving in San Francisco would be one of the happiest days of my life, and it was in many ways. But at the same time it was one of the saddest. I never expected that leaving the team would be the hardest part of the trip, but it really was.

Oh and, thanks Ellen and Mike for putting me up in SF/Oakland!

So that's it. That's the 4k for Cancer 2009. I'll probably actually make another blog entry about it cause I keep thinking of random stories from the trip that I want to write down, and since I didn't keep a journal, I'll just write them here. And I'll put up photos, when I am home and can put all my pictures on my computer.