Tag: rest-day

Rest Day in South Lake Tahoe — 0 mi, 0 ft

Today was an exceedingly rare morning in which the team was slow to get ready and out the door. I’ll go ahead and type out another line so you can read the sarcasm between the lines. 

As of 11am, I had just woken up. When I walked out, I found Aarushi and Carmen in the hot tub – Drew joined them shortly. Caroline was diligently working on posting blogs. Nunu had also recently woken up and was lounging about. Tatiana was somewhere in the city getting her legs waxed. 

As of 12:30pm, Tatiana had returned, and she and Drew swapped places with Tatiana joining in the hot tub while Drew went to grab a burger from Five Guys. Meanwhile, the rest of the team made themselves avocado toast, while Nunu and I attempted to make an itinerary for the day. We repeatedly had to push the “leave the house” part of our itinerary back as we watched the day slip away from us. 

The difficulty of itinerary making stemmed from the fact that Drew had blown out his back tire two days prior on the ride into Tahoe and needed it to be replaced. We had originally thought there was a Trek store in North Lake Tahoe, where we wanted to go spend the day at a beach and hiking, but it turns out Drew had discovered a non-existent Trek store and, instead, the store was in Reno. 

We ended up scrapping the hiking part of the itinerary to make time for repairing Drew’s bike, and decided to leave at 2pm towards the beach, have Drew drop everyone off and go fix the bike, and then meet us back at the beach after the ~1 hour drive both ways to Reno. By the time he got back at 5pm, we would head back and make an end-of-spokes/last-rest-day dinner, then sleep for our very climby 100 mile ride out of the Sierras tomorrow. 

We received several eye rolls when we declared that we needed to leave at 2pm, in 30 minutes, since people didn’t think it would happen – which, to this day writing this blog after spokes has ended, I’m still not sure why this was thought as a herculean task since it was more than enough time. But as they say, “Fool me 287 times throughout the summer, shame on me”, because at 2pm only half the team was ready, Drew walked in with his burger in hand, and Tatiana walked out of the bathroom looking about the same as she did 30 minutes ago. 

In any case, we eventually made it out the door, but not before Aarushi ran back inside to grab her headphones to listen to her 7 hours of audio messages to herself for her blog from the 200 mile ride a few days ago. Throughout the ride, much of the car was focused on catching up on blogs, including a particularly egregious Tatiana who was trying to avoid DOUBLE lapping (e.g. her next blog day was tomorrow, and she hadn’t finished her blog from 2 weeks ago). 

Driving to the beach took a bit under an hour, and we arrived at a boat ramp area that strictly stated “No Drop Off”. Well no matter, we’ve ignored much more threatening signs before and decided we would loop back around, quickly get out of the car, and have Drew drive off. Unfortunately, “quick” is not in the vocabulary of much of our team so half of us got out quickly while the other half was still packing up their stuff in the car, so Drew drove off to do another loop with half the team after a big boat pulled up behind us. 

On the third loop, the rest of the team got out but Caroline forgot her sketch/drawing bag in the car, so she ran after Drew to get her stuff from the car. Unfortunately, by this point we had exhausted all of our allotted stealth and had caught the attention of some park rangers who proceeded to interrogate Caroline as she grabbed her bag out of the car:

• Park Ranger (PR): “Hey, you can’t get dropped off here! Tell him [Drew] he can’t drive away!” 
• Drew hears this, and drives away.
• PR: “You have to get back in that car!”
• Caroline (C): “I can’t…” (The car had driven away). 
• PR: “Who was that?”
• C: “One of my friends dropping off some stuff for me”
• PR: “Where did you come from then? How did you get into the beach?”
• C: “I walked in from the trail”

There might’ve been some more back and forth but in the end Caroline just walked away while the ranger furiously radio’d people over their walkie-talkie. When Caroline met up with us, she quickly changed into her swim suit to avoid being recognizable, and then we continued peacefully with our beach day. 

By now it was ~3:15pm, and the others got ready for beach activities while I went on a run down a super pretty bike trail that ran alongside the lake. 

^{Pictures from the trail I ran along the lake.}

When I got back, everyone was gone, so I grabbed some snacks and went looking for them. I found most of them jumping off some rocks in the distance, and Nunu much closer when she jumped out from behind a bush to try to scare me – not much luck there. 

She had been walking back to where our stuff was to grab our floatie when she spotted me, so we walked back to inflate the floatie. Nunu had come up with the brilliant idea that we should swim the floatie around a cove of rocks to bring it to the rest of the team, instead of just walking 3 minutes with it. She managed to rope Tatiana into the idea as well, but the floatie only made it about 10 feet off the shore before the three of us gave up and walked it over. 

We walked over to where Carmen, Aarushi, and Carmen were sitting on a rock, dropped the floatie in the water, and began paddling it towards some deeper water. Some yelling immediately ensued about “bring the floatie over here [to the rocks]”, “just come swim to the floatie”, “I don’t want to swim to the floatie”, “just swim”, “the water is cold”, “you’ll get wet either way”, “why didn’t you guys wait for us to come down from the rocks”, and some other chaos like that. 

All this yelling was interfering with my relaxation, so I decided to swim off and go lay on some rocks where I could listen to the calm crashing of waves instead of the loud crashing out of teammates. 

At this point time started to dilate since I was going in and out of micronaps and I didn’t have my phone on me to check the time (it was back with all our stuff, this will be important shortly). 

At various intervals of ~30 minutes I briefly checked on the status of the team. First I saw the floatie wasn’t in the water anymore, but I saw the team walking off in the distance. A bit later, Nunu found me while I was peering up from my rocks and joined in some rock laying. Again a bit later, we checked again from a distance, since at this point we had been at the beach for a while, but saw that all of our stuff was still all over the place, the floatie laying fully inflated, and Caroline appearing to be drawing on our picnic blanket. Clearly, no plans on leaving any time soon, back to the rocks we go. 

After maybe 20 minutes lying down (again, neither of us had phones so we don’t really know, but it felt like 20 minutes), we checked again from a distance. All of our stuff is gone. Uh oh…

We walked back to where our stuff was and sure enough, it’s all gone: our phones, shoes, clothes, snacks, etc. I looked around in the sand expecting some sort of message written out for us or a hole hidden by leaves with our phones in it so we could communicate with them, but no such luck. 

We walked around the beach aimlessly for a while, not sure if they left us to get groceries and would come back to pick us up, if they forgot about us, or maybe were enacting some cruel punishment on us for not checking in with them sooner. We asked some other beach goers to use their phones, but like most modern Zoomers we don’t know any of our friends’ phone numbers, so we just tried calling our own phones hoping that the team would hear them buzzing. After a few calls, we gave up and went back to aimless walking, hoping the team would show up out of nowhere to save us from desolation. 

It’s quite surprising how immediately helpless you feel without your phone: we couldn’t call an Uber, couldn’t get directions home, couldn’t call to see where everyone was, couldn’t get a pizza delivered to our location. Yep, at this point, hunger was setting in and it was becoming clear that we only had a few hours left before we would have to resort to cannibalism. Either way, with no water, we could probably only survive 1-2 more hours. 

It was at this point that bad turned into worse. We look over to where our stuff was before and THERE WAS A BEAR. 

Ok the cannibalism was a joke but this is serious, there was actually a bear like 10 feet away from us. To be honest, the worst part of this whole situation was I didn’t have my phone to take a picture of it for the blog. 

We stood around with some other beach goers at a probably-not-that-safe distance watching as the bear slowly walked across the beach past us and up to a big dumpster looking for food. It jumped up and looked into it for a while, at which point I realized that Nunu was holding a bag of salt and vinegar potato chips… we’re done for…

The bear must not have a very good sense of smell because eventually it gave up on the dumpster and just kept walking towards the other side of the beach. Or maybe it just doesn’t like vinegar chips, me neither. In hindsight, I don’t get why the beach had a bunch of bear-proof trash cans everywhere if they were just going to leave an open dumpster in the middle of the parking lot. 

At this point, we went back to trying to find a way to contact the team – now with a bit more urgency. To do so, we had to keep walking in the direction that the bear had walked off towards though. Eventually, we found someone who let them use their phone, this time we planned to call Nunu’s mom who had Aarushi’s number. 

But right as we were about to call her mom a park ranger started yelling, “GET OFF THE BEACH! THE BEAR IS COMING! THIS IS SERIOUS, GET OFF THE BEACH! GO! LEAVE YOUR STUFF! YOU NEED TO GO NOW!”. 

This could not have been the best way to deal with this situation, surely inciting panic just causes more problems. Across today, the Sand Beach State Park Rangers definitely left a bit to be desired. 

But anyways, we handed back the phone and walked off (calmly) away from the yelling park ranger towards the visitor center, still wondering what we were going to do. It was at this point that we spotted the iconic orange top bag in the distance. We ran towards our salvation, and ran into Caroline, who had apparently been walking up and down the beach asking if people had seen “a shirtless curly hair guy probably wearing a hat and a short Asian girl”.

We hopped into the van and exchanged stories with the rest of the team. Apparently, they didn’t know that we didn’t have our phones and just packed everything up to meet Drew when he said he was arriving at the beach. 

At this point, we headed back to continue our plan of cooking dinner for our last rest day. We stopped and picked up groceries, then headed home and everyone worked on cooking a delicious meal of burgers, baked potatoes, fruit, corn salad, and mac n’ cheese. 

^{Everyone working hard on cooking. I, of course, was in charge of supervision and photography. Just kidding, I helped too, I swear.}

Drew, who was in charge of burgers, may have cooked them too well done on the grill outside and had to move to the pans on the stove. This, of course, naturally led him to throw the patties into a pan of hot oil and splash oil all over himself, giving himself second degree burns on his arms and legs. 

^{A picture of Drew’s burns the day after.}

Besides this, the cooking went pretty smoothly and we enjoyed a very yummy last dinner. 

Afterwards, Drew, Nunu, and I super quickly cleaned up all the dishes and kitchen and then we all went to bed for the first of our upcoming back-to-back century days. 

– Nate

Rest Day in Bryce Canyon National Park — 0 mi, 0 ft

Technically, this blog starts at midnight when some of us were watching the first 5 minutes of Cars 2 after having finished watching Cars. Everyone was super tired after a ~50 mile day but the absurdity of Cars 2 required a quick preview. The Cars vs Cars 2 debate is also a highly contentious topic on the team, only after the infamous “Best Burger” debate, so it felt necessary. Somehow, there’s an argument to be made that the movie Cars 2 will have long lasting effects on our summer – you’ll have to keep reading + read tomorrow’s blog to find out why though.

After sleeping around 12:30am, we woke up at a sloth-like 10am. The team all woke up super slowly, with some people not getting out of bed until 10:30am when breakfast was ready. 

My parents were visiting us for our rest day in Bryce Canyon. I’m super lucky that I got to spend time with them along the trip, and the rest of the team was super lucky to be blessed by their super good food (I’m a little biased, but it was actually super good). 

For breakfast, my Mom made a spanish breakfast dish called huevos ahogados, which is a poached egg and tomato sauce dish adjacent to shakshuka. 

After breakfast, we lounged around for two hours. The fatigue from biking and national parks was really starting to show at this point (Bryce is the fourth national park we’ve been to in the past week). While everyone was very excited to go check out a park as cool as Bryce, everyone was also super tired and no one had the motivation to wrangle the group into getting ready and leaving. 

Around 12, Caroline, resident National Parks enjoyer, decided enough was enough and that it was time to leave.

From 12-12:30, I sat in the living room and witnessed what I could only describe as if I was sitting in the main “hangout” area of a 90s sitcom. The characters kept entering and exiting the scene but were never all in the scene at the same time because no one wanted to wait if everyone else wasn’t ready. Peak spokes behavior. Eventually, though, the episode came to an end and all the characters arrived in the living room at the same time and we were able to leave. 

We drove ~5 minutes to Bryce Canyon to do the Sunrise Point/Wall Street hike – the canonical Bryce Canyon hike down into the canyon and through the hoodoos¹. The hike was ~2 miles, ~600 feet of elevation gain, and absolutely stunning. 

The hike into and out of the canyon required hiking some very tight switchbacks which was super easy on the way down… Unfortunately my sister and mom had a less enjoyable time on the way back up, prompting the team to donate most of their water to them and ask many times if they needed to stop in the shade (they often did). 

At some point, the team introduced my parents to the term “Aarushi Gap”, which describes the observed phenomenon of a gap in a group of bikers where Aarushi is the leading biker following the gap. My dad really enjoyed this term – using it often throughout the hike (not necessarily at Aarushi’s expense, but not not necessarily). He even attempted to push the frontier of the Aarushi Gap research space by proposing the Aarushi Gravitational Gap Conjecture (AGGC), which states that those near Aarushi will be pulled towards her and slowed down accordingly, after observing that my Mom was walking slowly with Aarushi far behind the rest of the group. I think the AGGC is likely based on a confounded variable though: my Mom was just tired and Aarushi was nicely waiting for her.

After certain members of our group had recovered from the hike, we drove over to a few more view points and then the visitor center. At one view point, we spotted a food truck called “Hoodoo’s Food”, which Aarushi claimed should be renamed to “Hoodoo’s Foodoos”.

We then left Bryce and went to this shopping area and looked around at a souvenir shop for a bit. 

Afterwards, my parents got their second taste of average Spokes behavior when we stood around in the parking lot for 5 minutes trying to decide if we wanted to get ice cream, get a burger, or go home. In the end, Nunu asserted a decision by jaywalking across the street to the ice cream place, prompting everyone to follow. Drew went to get a burger though, no surprise there. 

After getting ice cream, Nunu jaywalked (criminal behavior) back to the other side to go to a cafe. Then Caroline did as well. The rest of us stood around in the parking lot for literally 10 minutes waiting for them, and then of course the rest of the team eventually followed into the cafe.

At this point, my parents (and me too) wanted to go home – my parents because they needed to finish dinner, I was just bored. As we prepared to leave in my parents’ rental car, the rest of the team came running out just in time and joined us on our way back home.

We all drove back to the Airbnb around 5 and lounged/napped for 2 hours while my dad finished slow cooking the pork shoulder that would become our pulled pork dinner. I spent my 2 hours taking a nap, eating watermelon and cold leftover steak from last night, and going on a 6 mile run. My hopes for the summer are to not lose all my running progress since biking doesn’t translate super well to running, but its not looking good 😢

I got back around 7:15, showered, and put Cars 2 on the TV in the living room. Eventually, the entire team was in the living room watching Cars 2 until dinner was ready. 

We enjoyed a delicious meal of super tender pulled pork, homemade pickled onions, and a super secret recipe pasta salad and potato salad (the secret ingredient is finding a nearby grocery store). 

After dinner, my parents surprised me with a birthday cake since my birthday is next week and they wont be here for it which was fun.

Then we got ready for sleep. For Tatiana, this entailed cleaning her bike bag in which her dog mace had exploded the day before. This inevidabtly led to lots of coughing and some tears after Tatiana found out the pepper spray was certainly not washed out of the bag. Poor Caroline also fell victim to some pepper spray since she was on laundry that day and needed to go into the laundry room where Tatiana was cleaning her bag. 

The next step for getting ready for bed is brushing your teeth. If you’re Tatiana, this means you wash your mouth with the hands you were using to clean out your pepper-sprayed bike bag. You can imagine how that went. 

I’m driving tomorrow so I put Cars 2 back on so I could watch a bit more with my parents, but the rest of the team has a 100 mile ride into Zion National Park so they needed to sleep in order to wake up at 6am in the morning. 

So explain to me why the entire team, besides Drew, ended up in the living room watching Cars 2 as well until 11pm. This prompted them to push the wakeup time to 7am without telling Drew. 

Surely this won’t have any implications tomorrow. Oh boy, what a cliff hanger. 

– Nate

¹ Hoodoos are tall, thin spires of rock sculpted by rain, ice, and wind in arid regions like badlands. They feature a soft rock pillar protected by a hard rock capstone (National Park Service). Hoodoo’s Rock formations [are] formed by erosion. Freezing snow, wind, & rain have all played a part in creating the spectacular Hoodoo’s (the back of my shirt).

Hittle Bottom Campground, UT to Moab, UT — 32.14 mi, 1703 ft

We didn’t finish our ride yesterday so we have to spend today biking to finish the ride. Strictly speaking, we don’t “have to” since we could’ve just SAG’d the last 30 miles of yesterdays’ ride after we got caught in a pretty bad thunderstorm. But we also don’t “have to” bike across the country. 

We had left our bikes locked up at a campground along our route last night with the plan of coming back to pick them up and finish the ride in the morning. It didn’t take any convincing to get the bikers to agree to finish the ride on our rest day, 30 miles is a super short ride anyways and is an easy moral victory over an otherwise unnecessary SAG. The one who we did have to convince though, was our driver Tatiana who wanted to sleep in. It took a non-trivial amount of convincing, some laundry day trades, and coffee + pastry offers, but eventually we convinced her. 

We woke up at 7am in our super nice Airbnb kindly donated to us by the owners. We spent a quick 30 minutes getting ready, deliberating on whether we should wear our white jerseys again or cycle forward to black jerseys (we ended up with black), ransacking the fridge’s ice machine for all its ice, and dragging Tatiana out of bed at the last possible moment. Much faster than our usual 2hrs when we have to pack all our stuff + the car. 

We arrived at the campsite at 8:30am where we were super happy to see our bikes had neither been stolen nor blown away. 

We then got to work on topping off water, packing snacks, and applying sunscreen. Since it was a short ride, the plan was to do the 30 mile ride unsupported (e.g. pack all of our own water and food with no car to give us supplies along the route). By the time we were ready to head out at 9am though, it was already feeling a bit toasty and we were probably a bit worried about having enough water in the heat. We headed off though, knowing that our fearless driver would come help us if we needed water and surely would not still be asleep when we finished the ride (Hint: she was asleep, but its ok we didn’t need water). 

The ride itself was super pretty, and getting biking meant the wind helped cool us off and alleviate any heat/water concerns. The ride started in this huge “bowl” of open space within a canyon for 5 miles. These 5 miles of open space were also the primary concern we had yesterday when deciding not to bike in the middle of a thunderstorm. 

We then went into the canyons along a river running through them for the next 15-20 miles. Super pretty stuff. 

^{The canyon + river we biked along for 15-20 miles.}

It’s interesting that we had seen the entire route on the drive from the Airbnb to our bikes, yet everything felt so much prettier when we saw it from our bikes. Tatiana pointed this out in her recent Day 45 blog, saying that every view feels prettier when you feel like you’ve worked for it, and I 100% agree. 

We barrelled through the mile 15 rest stop since we didn’t see any reason for a break on such a short ride, and since we wanted to finish as soon as possible to get back to our previously scheduled rest day. 

After biking through the canyon a bit longer, we exited out into the city of Moab and biked 8 miles uphill to the exact opposite end of the city where our Airbnb was. Having this house was certainly worth it, but boy did they make us work for it. 

We arrived at the house one by one between 11am and 11:30am just as the heat was picking up and then headed off to do some combination of showering and napping until 12:30 when we decided to go get lunch at a burger place called Milt’s that Drew had seen along the route. 

Now, there’s been a lot of deliberation this summer over the best burger restaurant, mainly between the In-N-Out camp and the Freddy’s camp. Both camps came together on this one though, Milt’s was some phenomenal burgers. Best of the summer for me. 

After chowing down, we headed over to a cafe to do some work rather than be outside in the 100° heat. The work included: writing blogs (10 days behind as of now), calling friends/family, reading, and, in my case, completing background checks for the job I’ll be starting after Spokes.

Carlos, Nunu’s boyfriend, was visiting the team for the two Moab rest days, and he arrived at the cafe around 2:30pm. After a fun mix of greetings, introductions, handshakes, and hugs, Nunu and Carlos went off to explore the town. Seems like everyone else slowly got the same idea because by 3pm I looked around and I was the only one left in the cafe. Everyone’s stuff was all over the cafe, so I called them back (and inadvertently put them back to work) since I needed to go back to the house to grab my portable charger. 

I drove back, didn’t find my portable charger after looking in the bed for 20-30 minutes, found it on the bedside table, and then headed back to the cafe. 

After getting back around 4:15pm, all 8 of us (7 + carlos) went for a quick stroll to check out Moab’s main street and immediately got sucked into a t-shirt store where you can print designs onto different t-shirt blanks. Aarushi and the girls really wanted to buy shirts with a matching “Moab, Utah” design with cartoon-ish bikers on it. 

The girls spent ~30 minutes figuring out what type of shirt, color of shirt, and color of design they wanted. They didn’t even finish deciding since we had to run to dinner at 5pm, but we made plans to go back tomorrow. Drew and I were skeptical of getting shirts. Drew decided he didn’t want one. I said I’d get one if I could get it as a pink tank top, but I was told I was not allowed to get the pink tank top.

We had been very generously donated a dinner at Arches Thai, a Thai restaurant in downtown Moab, at 5pm, and walked 2 blocks down to the restaurant. The food was truly really good, I really wasn’t expecting Moab, Utah to come out with full swing with such great food, but it really hasn’t disappointed at all. 

^{The food from Arches Thai, which all had these crazy carrot flowers on them.}

Around 6pm, we left to go check out Canyonlands National Park. At the exact same time, it became super windy and started raining + thundering lightly. We trudged our way to the cars (our minivan + the Jeep Carlos had rented) with our eyes covered to stop the sand from flying into our eyes, and then started driving ~1 hour towards the park.

^{Proof of the storm. The sand stopped blowing right when I started taking a video but it was crazy I swear.}

Throughout the ride, we were receiving various “Flash Flood Warning” notifications to our phones. Resident National Parks Expert Caroline Huang said we’d be fine though, so we stayed on plan to visit the park. 

Good thing we did too, because when we got there we pretty much had the whole park to ourselves. Even the park rangers had gone home: the front gate said “pay at the visitor center”, but the visitor center was closed. Luckily, we already support the National Park system via our annual National Parks pass, but it still seems crazy to me that we only saw like 3 cars the entire time there. 

The park itself was stunning, and the storm gave the whole park a sort of other-worldly feeling to all the already other-worldly canyon views throughout the park. There was one instance where Caroline, Drew, and Carmen felt their hair starting to rise, which prompted them to start running to the car (without telling the rest of us!?), but otherwise the storm only meant we got slightly wet while taking in the views. 

^{For the record, if I was running from something I would at least tell everyone else they should run too…}

We checked out the iconic Mesa Arch, saw a double rainbow at Green River Overlook (+ also saw where the rainbow ended, no pot of gold unfortunately), and took in some other crazy views throughout the park. 

^{The iconic Mesa Arch}

^{Double rainbow and the end of a rainbow 🌈🌈}

^{Some other crazy views throughout the park (and everyone taking pictures of them)}

When things got dark enough that we couldn’t really see anything anymore around 9pm, we drove back to the house. We put on the movie “Cars” for a bit until we all started falling asleep an hour in, and then decided to hit the hay at 11:30pm. 

 – Nate

Rest day in Idaho Springs, CO — 0 mi, 0 ft

Per usual, we woke up this morning. Not per usual, I woke up and the car was already unloaded and ready for us to drive off and spend our rest day white water rafting! Even more not per usual, I ate my breakfast of assorted snacks we had in the car with this crazy view from the porch of our Airbnb. 

We left at 10:30 to drive 1.5hrs to the white water rafting location. Unfortunately, they’re making it hard for me to write about anything interesting in this blog since absolutely nothing happened before noon, but we saw some tandem bike bikepackers (bikers on a long-distance unsupported bike ride, easily identified by the many bags attached to their bike) on the drive there which was pretty cool. 

When we arrived at the white water rafting, we all signed in and then everyone besides Drew and I immediately ran to the cafe across the street. 

We had discovered this rafting late last night, and were deciding between rafting on a Class 2 and a Class 5 rapid. We were told that a Class 2 rapid was “more for scenery than thrill” while Class 5 required “extremely strong swimming ability”. 

^{Class 2 Rapids (left) vs Class 5 Rapids (right).}

Only half of the team wanted to do the Class 5 rapid, but we needed all 7 of us to agree to do it for the rafting company to let us go since we would be the only ones going and they need at least 7 people to go to make a profit on the trip. We ended up going with Class 2 after we were told some of us could go in kayaks instead of rafts in order to increase the “thrill”. 

Back in the present, we remembered that Drew and Carmen wanted to kayak, so Drew talked to the person at the desk to switch two of our seven spots to kayak spots. We quickly learned about a double-kayak option, so we switched to a double-kayak. Then I wanted to kayak too, so we switched to a double and a single. Then Nunu wanted to kayak, so we switched to two doubles. Each of these changes occurred with a couple minutes of spacing between them. Yes, this is actually how we operate.

With the circus over, the rafting guides started handing out life jackets to the rafters, as well as helmets and water shoes for the kayakers. We then hopped onto a bus that would drive us ~20 minutes to the river.

When we got to the river, us kayakers were taken away for a brief lesson on white water kayaking: 

1. Follow the path the rafts take
2. Go head on into rapids
3. Go to shore to climb back into your raft if you fall out

Immediately after pushing into the moderately-paced moving water, both kayak doubles (Drew+Carmen and Nunu+myself) started uncontrollably spinning in the water. Turns out steering on these inflatable kayaks is harder than it looks since they slide very easily on the water. It wouldn’t be until later that we would realize that paddling backwards was the optimal technique for steering, but we didn’t have time to figure that out since the first drop was rapidly approaching. 

1. Follow the path the rafts take.

After doing approximately 7 full 360 spins on our kayak, Nunu and I realized the first drop was approaching. We also realized we had spun to the far right side of the river where there were many rocks blocking the river, while everyone else was on the left side where the actual fall was. 

We paddled as hard as we could to get to the left side of the river, but our subpar steering ability meant we only narrowly avoided the rocks. 

2. Go head on into rapids.

Because we had to book it to make it across the river and avoid the rocks, we ended up approaching and entering the fall sideways (not head on). We fell down the fall fine, but ended up stuck at the bottom as the rapids pushed us back into the bottom of the fall. 

We sat stuck at the bottom of the fall for ~2 seconds before the inevitable happened: our kayak flipped. How embarrassing. 

3. Go to shore to climb back into your raft if you fall out

I don’t really understand the purpose of this rule, I climbed back into the kayak fairly easily and then helped pull Nunu back in. One of the guides on the raft shouted out, “Go to shore to get back on… or don’t…” after we flopped back onto the kayak. 

If you thought this circus was a 2-clown show, you’re sorely mistaken. After having made it down the fall, Carmen and Drew decided to paddle back into the fall to surf it. They promptly flipped into the water. 

I don’t know who let these people get into the kayaks.

After everyone was back in their kayaks, the raft caravan continued down some slow moving water, and us kayakers were able to get a better handle of things. At this point, we were spinning willingly and able to actually follow the rafts. We went down some more rapids gracefully and masterfully, I guess to the surprise of the guides because we were asked twice how many more times we had fallen. 

At this point, things must’ve been going too smoothly, and Tatiana must’ve been in a violent mood, because she started trying to splash all the kayaks. Shortly after, she put down her kayak and locked eyes with Drew sitting in his kayak – at that moment, I knew exactly what was about to happen. 

Tatiana stood up from her raft, and jumped on to the front of Drew and Carmen’s kayak. She then grabbed Drew by his lifejacket and tried to drag him into the water. Funnily enough, she fell into the water first, but poetic justice was not in the cards for Drew as he got dragged down by his lifejacket into the water right after. 

I can’t really say what injustice has been inflicted upon Tatiana to fuel her spree of violence, but right after her and Drew climbed back into their respective floatation vehicles I start hearing screams from behind us. The water was so calm, sky so clear, and weather so nice that you’d almost think some people would like to enjoy the peace. But no, I look around to see Tatiana trying to shove Aarushi into the water. If you are a relative or close friend of Tatiana, please reach out to her I think she needs help.

There is certainly no rest for the wicked, because right after the aformentioned chaos subsided, we immediately went into another rapid. This time, we might’ve followed Step 1 of kayaking (“Follow the path the rafts take”) a little too closely because the two kayaks came up on a sharp turn into a cliff side pretty quickly and crowded right behind two rafts and all four groups crashed together onto the side of the cliff. 

We were fine though, I just like tossing in a bit of suspense. We kept going for a bit longer through a few more rapids, until we arrived at a 30ft cliff for the cliff jumping portion of the trip.

I don’t think anyone was really comprehending what we were getting ourselves into, or how tall 30ft is, as we marched up the cliff in single file like thoughtless ants. By the time you get to the top and 10 year old little girls are jumping off the cliff though, there’s no going back. So off we went, because we all know what they say about jumping off a cliff when all your friends are doing it. 

As we got ready to finish off the trip, Drew, Carmen, and I switched out of the kayaks so that Aarushi, Tatiana, and Caroline could give them a try. Unfortunately for them, our guide let us know that all the rapids were over, but I guess it’s the thought that counts. 

We floated down the river for ~30 minutes before reaching the end of the trip, pulled our rafts/kayaks out of the water, and hopped onto the bus for a ~40 minute ride back to the car. 

When we got back, we changed out of our wet clothes and munched on the many snacks that we conveniently always carry in the minivan. 

We also gave copious amounts of pets to the rafting company’s dog mascot sitting outside. I think this must be the fourth time I’ve taken a picture of Caroline petting a large white dog, related it to Max, and put it in the blog. 

^{Caroline is a team of 1 MIT students biking across America reconciling with large, white dogs along the way.}

With very empty stomachs, we decided to drive to a nearby food hall for dinner. The market was cool, very millenial vibes, but super overpriced. Nunu and Drew got a burger for upwards of $20-25, and Aarushi, Tatiana, Nunu, and I got a couple of empanadas for ~$6 each (!). Feeding a team of bikers at that price would cost a small fortune so we decided to drive over to a nearby Chinese restaurant and order takeout. 

In terms of quantity, the food did not disappoint. My beef lo mein was so densely packed that it felt like a brick that could pose danger to a small child. I ate some in the car on the 1.5hr drive back to the Airbnb, but started getting full without it even looking like I dented the noodle brick. This is really saying a lot since usually I vacuum food without feeling a thing. 

After we got back, I got serious and cleared out the rest of my food – can’t let them forget how things work around here. Then, Nunu and I spent 2-3 hours going through receipts and expenses from the trip to update our badly out of date budget tracking spreadsheet. 

^{Various members of the team enjoying their food (and some REALLY enjoying their food) on the patio.}

Sometime during then, Aarushi’s friend Margarita arrived at the house after her 2 hour drive to hang out and stay the night with us before driving another 2 hours back in the morning to go to work. 

After finishing finances, we decided to test out the Airbnb’s sauna (test failed I think) and then finish out the night in the hot tub before going to bed for a very long Continental Divide climb tomorrow. 

Goodnight.

– Nate