The last couple days have been pretty mellow. I went on a nice solo ride on Sunday and explored the area a bit. There are a lot of really good climbs in the Santa Monica mountains. Getting out there from the beach in Oxnard (where the house is) is super flat and a little smelly from the sulfur fertilizer used on all the big Lemon and Avocado farms, though.
The communities at the base on the Santa Monica range are all your typical upscale west-coast urban communities but still give the feeling of urban sprawl with no real centralized public areas like you would find in more established communities like Santa Barbara or Ventura. It's kind of a bummer to have to jump on a super busy highway to go to the grocery store or a coffee shop and still be surrounded by identical homes and people you don't know at home. Wait, you have to get in a car to go places in WV, right? Sure, but the difference is that when you're at home you are drenched in peaceful solitude with mountains and rivers sheltering your privacy. Home should be a sanctuary not a locked-door chamber.
Everyone is back from this weekend's race so the house is full again. One of my teammates, Martin Gilbert, came back wrapped in bandages from a nasty fall that left his fork snapped in half and his carbon wheels crushed and missing about half the spokes. He rode into a buddy of mine from the National Road Team when the guy crashed right in front of him at about 25miles an hour!
Jeremiah Bishop called me a few days ago. He's getting ready to leave for the Pan-American MTB Championships in Argentina. Good luck, JB.
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