I've always wanted to see the San Diego Zoo

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A lot can happen in a few hours, or is that not a lot?

Back from dinner last night and the route planning didn't go well. Eventually we decided to modify the route notes we had to make it easier to get out of town. I drew the short straw (actually it was the low card, 2 of hearts) and was the nominated driver for the first part of the ride in the morning.

Not a bad sleep in the van, not great, but not bad, I'm sure we'll have no trouble sharing it for the trip. Dave and Tommy shared the large double bed last night sleeping toe to tail. Makes me happy I'm the shortest and the only one that will fit on the kiddies bed, which you have to convert from the kitchen table, so I get to sleep alone for the trip. It only takes a few minutes to convert the table into a bed, so that wont be a problem each night and morning. Jeff is sleeping on the double bed above the driving cabin so he just has to remember not to lift his head more than 40cm above the bed or he'll whack his head on the roof. Again, I'm sure that wont be a problem. (Editor's Note: WTF were we thinking!!!)

A little slow getting ready this morning but it's our first day, I'm sure I can snap them into line in no time (or they'll dump me by the side of the road, one of the two). We drove 10km out of Oceanside to a supermarket and did the shopping for the day and the other Three Amigos left from there. The first stint was 40km and pretty uneventful as we left the suburbs. The hardest bit is trying to find somewhere to wait for the riders so you can keep fairly close to them in case there are any mechanicals. Tommy got into the RV to drive for the second leg of the day and I got to have my first ride for the day. The plan was to do another 40km leg for the next change over, but, as we were going to be reminded often, just because we had a plan, didn't mean it would be followed.

After we had ridden about 40km we were in the town of Escondido. A lovely medium sized town that unfortunately we were not meant to be passing through. We had taken a wrong turn about 20kms back and were now basically lost. We called Tommy but there was no service at his end - so much for the good signal coverage we were promised. We checked Dave's maps and worked out how we could make our way back on course and messaged Tommy with the info. We had gone so far south that our recovery route took us past the San Diego Zoo.

Tom eventually called us back. He was meant to drive 40kms and wait, but instead had driven about 80km to the end of the days ride!!! We had lost so much time working out where we were and heading back in the right direction that we had to change our overnight stop to a tiny little town called called Santa Ysabel which was another 43kms ride from our current position. We let "Tommy-Too-Far" know where to meet us and told him to wait for us there, after all 40kms in a car is much faster than 43kms on a bike.

It was literally an uphill battle for most of the 43kms. The sun was hot and it was slow going. When we eventually got to Santa Ysabel about 3 hours later Tommy-Too-Far was nowhere to be seen. And we had no way of contacting him because there was no phone signal there (again, not very happy with our friend from the T-Mobile shop). This was the reason that we hadn't been able to contact each other earlier in the day. Tommy-Too-Far eventually turned up about 30 minutes later. He'd been driving all over the place looking for us and was quite concerned. Luckily Santa Ysabel has a reasonable restaurant and we all order huge rib-eye steaks for dinner and discuss what went wrong and how to avoid it from happening again.

We now have a modified route for tomorrow as we head into the desert. The plan is to leave reasonably early to try and avoid the worst of the heat, and more importantly not get lost. I'm sure tomorrow will be better, what (else) could go wrong.

Footnote: Dave has the early lead in the puncture count getting a flat out front of the San Diego Zoo.

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