ALC Recap- Day Seven... The final day

Day Seven- A day of gladness and sadness...glad to be done riding, but sad to see it all end.

Day Seven always has some sort of excitement happening, and this year was no different. While it was fun to come upon this sign along the PCH, at the same time ( a few miles past this sign), Daniel got a blow-out.

(I have no idea who put this sign up but I think it was someone from the Discussion Forum
- and by the way I did hit 21,000 miles this week!)

And speaking of Discussion Forum- Day 7 I also got to meet Ken Berg who is from Maryland and came out to SF to do the ride. Ken was a regular contributor to the Discussion Forum, especially through the winter-- where he had to train indoors often because of the snow outside!

Ken, Me and Daniel RS2, Day 7

Ok, so back to Daniel's tire drama....his tube basically exploded, and at the same time some of the tread on his tire blew, however no hole showed up in the tire. (He was so pissed too because they were brand new tires he had just purchased for the ride!) I booted it with a dollar bill, and later when we told Mark Smith about it he gave us a nice piece of duct tape (remember the duct tape dresses?) so that we could really patch it in case it blew again.

Which of course it did- right in front of the Starbucks on San Vincente. This time we found a small staple wire in the tire and pulled it out, put on a new tube, put duct tape on the inside of the tire and rode on to Peets (our preferred coffee bar), a whole 3 or so miles.

Chaos at Peets...

We spent the rest of the afternoon outside at Peets, cheering riders in to closing ceremonies as they rode by...

Daniel, me, Shawna & Michael clanging cowbells.

Then there was closing ceremonies....

Mike sat in a tree and caught this photo of
me riding into closing ceremonies...

After closing ceremonies, 4 of us hopped into a rented Suburban and headed over to our hotel in Santa Monica. On the way to dinner , or maybe it was lunch the next day we found this great store:

Julie Brown