PAV Blog Day 4_1.24 San Francisco to Santa Barbara

Hello! I'm really wondering how long I will make an entry for everyday, even if its a few days later. One of the things I dislike about traveling is the days all start to blend together like the rest of my life and lose their value as experiences. Keeping on top of journaling is going to be one of more difficult tasks.

We left SF Saturday morning around 11:30 and made our way to a Yamaha dealership to buy oil. It appeared Lawson's bike as well as my own tend to burn a little oil. After adding our oil we geared up to leave the dealership and Chris mentioned that my chain was loose. I jumped off to look at it and noticed my rear sprocket was horribly cupped. The use of the word "horribly" may seem somewhat overboard, but in this case it was accurate. Fortuntely I'd made it that far without my chain failing but it was a problem I had to take care of before we could rack the miles up again. After visiting two more shops looking for a chain and sprockets we located a set in Santa Clara for $12o. This was definitely something I wasn't planning on and really couldn't afford. Side note: I also had to buy a new Chatterbox headphone/mic set because they completely failed on me, which set me back another $30. Spending $150 in one day on such a small budget really put me into a bad mood, not to mention by the time I had everything reinstalled it was 4:30pm and another day had been wasted working on my bike...or had it?
We potentially had a place to stay in San Jose, a half hour South, but that would only have put us 45min out of SF, which hardly pleased any of us. So we decided to start heading South and leave the rest to decide on later. We rode into the dark, which we fortunately have the option to do in the US. All riding out of the country will be done during daylight hours and we will need to be religous about getting off the road in the early afternoon to be safe. A few hours in we decided we could push into the morning hours and make it to Santa Barbara so I called Brett Stuvland to see if he had any vacancy. In my amazement he told me he had been planning and hoping to hear from us and offered for us to stay at his apartment(which is more of a house). We had 2 hours ahead of us and we were all getting exhausted. After a few break stops we made it to the shortcut highway 154 which reminded me alot of Oregon highways, two lanes, through the mountains, and winding the whole way. Towards the end of the highway, within 15mi of the apartment, we encountered what I thought to be the biggest test of our riding skills yet.
We came to the tightest turns yet, cliffside, with wind gusts that had to have been 1o-15mph. As we decended the wind grew stronger and our bodies tired. It was the hardest 15mi I've ridden yet. With cold hands, aching backs, and cramped legs we pulled in to Brett's complex around 2am, thankful to have food, a warm place to sleep, and more good friends to hangout with. We crashed and slept hard. ps...this is unedited, its too late for editing. sorry!