Tuesday November 25

THE ELEMENTS

Headwinds, rain, and city riding.

Whooo. We're beat. Forty miles from Lompoc to Goleta and headwinds the whole way. Headwinds is a wind that is blowing towards you and turns your body into a sail. This means you get to pedal your heart out uphill, and keep pedaling on the downhill. After miles and miles of monotanous biking we dropped onto the 101 and rode along the highway for a bit. At El Capitan we ate lunch and that's when the rain started. Personally, I was half estatic. I've been living on Catalina for awhile and haven't seen real rain since January. We were also really excited to finally use the rain gear that we've been lugging around for the last 4 bike trips - it's the first real rain we've even encountered on bikes! Soaking wet by midday, we finally arrived to Santa Barbara. We dropped people off at the different homestayes we'd be staying at for the next couple of days (awesome to have a roof over our heads during the rain - Thanks Danny's Granny, Chris, Brent & Dakota).

We regrouped at Ocean Futures to meet up with our friends Karen & Nancy. They had a full spread out for us and we mowed it down, especially the group that rode down State Street in the rain (keep an eye on the buses!). Lots of the OFS team is out on expedition in Norway studying Orca whales, so the office was a bit quiet. The latest news was that the bilge exploded on the ship (ewwwwww). We hope butter luck comes to our exploring friends up north. We also got to sneak preview some uncut clips for an upcoming special (my favorite was "Pink Dolphins") and generally just got to hang out in the office. Our friend Laura B who works one of the AOTE cruise ship programs showed up later and that was a special treat because she used to work out on the island as well.

We hit up the Farmers Market with her later. Divided into teams we asked the vendors there if they'd be willing to give us anything they didn't want to take back home with them. We came home with bins and boxes and bags full of great food. A couple of things worked in our favor 1) it is the biggest day for the Farmers Market in the year and it was raining 2) the food bank that normally picks up food didn't come today, 3) People were really friendly and overwhelmingly generous!