The Sleeping Situation

So the boys rolled into Placerville before I even left Davis. Another couchsurfer was staying in Davis, the one who filmed our video blog for Day 1. We went out to get Thai food for lunch before I left. It was so completely delicious. Really fresh ingredients and sauce that was really light and delicious. I might actually manage to eat healthy on this trip.

When we got back our host was cleaning her house and offered a bike tour of UC Davis. Now that was really interesting. First of all, it turns out that UC Davis allows communes to exist on their campus. As in kids living in domes or old houses with land to grow vegetables and to raise chickens. Second of all even without the hippie commune people, UC Davis grows its own olives and makes its own olive oil, which you can buy and third of all there are frozen yogurt places all over which we needed after biking in the heat in Davis. I'm not entirely sure how the boys are not passing out on their bikes, but I suppose that is why I am their support car driver and they are the cyclists.

I nearly crashed the bike that our hosts let me borrow anyway. It didn't have grips, so after putting on suntan lotion holding on was a problem and it barely had breaks, which in traffic was a problem, and it made this really interesting continuous squeaking noise, which wasn't anything but worrisome. Also, I was way way too short for that bike. Talk about immediate bruising. Soooo basically I'm a big sissy and should stay away from biking. It's a good thing I'm on a trip called BAAM. Turns out in Davis I am also exceptionally clumsy. I managed to knock over bikes and drop things and bang into things. I mean I'm uncoordinated, but I'm not normally that bad.

Also, I had to attempt to parallel park. I have not parallel parked since i took my drivers test. The other couchsurfer was laughing pretty hard while he watched me try to do it. Not only was it parallel parking, but it was parallel parking with spikes sticking off the back of the car.

Davis is pretty much the biking capital of the world. Everyone there bikes. They told me that they have more bikes per capita than anywhere else in the U.S. and they were beaten only by one foeign country and I forget which. I could actually believe it. The place we stayed had at least 8 bikes. Driving around there were bike racks everywhere and bike shops. The city's symbol was a bike with a huge wheel. There are bike lanes and traffic signals and paths. It was all very pretty.

I called this post the sleeping situation because sleeping is funny. We show up at a place we don't know and have never seen and get some sort of sleeping arrangement. At our other place we had two couches a floor and a backyard, no air conditioning. At this place we had a big community room floor to put our sleeping bags on, air conditioning and free reign in the kitchen (church kitchens always seem to be well stocked).

At this place, which has treated us so so well, they didn't want me to sleep on the same floor as the boys. Every place we go to will have new accommodations and expectations, you have to be very flexible when you are living off the kindness of strangers. This one was exceptionally funny to me because... well... they're stinky so it's not like I'm going near them anyway. Also they biked all day and are probably sore all over, so we get to the new place the boys eat all the food they can mooch (OK, I do too) or that we can make, and then they wander around blearily in bikers shorts until they pass out on a sleeping mat sometimes still stinky.

Then they wake up in the morning and go go go. You would think this would be boring for me, but I get to hang around the places we've been with our exceptionally nice hosts and I eat food that Mike German didn't buy and I sleep in til 10 am. So far, I am definitely very relaxed. Soon I shall rustle up a dinosaur museum to visit.

So in conclusion... sleeping at churches means that you are well fed and treated very nicely in air conditioning in clean locations. Also really funny things come up like the issue of girls sleeping at minimum 7 feet from very stinky boys. This is something I can live with. They've all been nothing but nice.

Signed most extravagantly,
One Shelly Kessler