To finish up...here's Day 8: The End

Hello everyone again!

We have re-emerged after resting up from the bike tour. I wanted to put in Evelyn and Dwight's running comments from when we were on the tour to finish up our day-to day summaries. Each night, Evelyn and Dwight would call Maria, and she would update the two blogs: The Ride of a Lifetime and Stanford Pedi Rheum Zoom Zoom for all 8 days. The last day was put in by Evelyn and can also be seen at http://biking4christiana.blogspot.com/... I just put in Evelyn's text into this blog; there are also photos of each day that can be seen on her other blog. Without further ado, here goes:

The Ride of a Lifetime
Tuesday, October 9, 2007

Day 8: The End
Hello everyone... (this is Evelyn) sorry we left you hanging for a couple days after we finished the race. It's been crazy busy with moving me in back to school, catching up with school and getting everything finalized for Hoops for Hope.

Anyway

Day 8: I fell a couple times today... just didn't clip out off the bike in time. I think I was a little too anxious to get there. Plus I wanted to have some wounds when I got to the finish line. We were on Highway 1 and passed through Malibu for half the ride (it was exciting to see that Los Angeles was less than 50 miles away!!).

Day 8 was very flat. I loved it. Just some rolling hills only 200 ft high (nothing like the 1500 ft climb we'd mastered on some other days). As we approached our destination, we stopped off at a seafood restaurant that was tradition (I actually forget the name at the moment) and just ordered drinks and a few appetizers. We wanted to make it quick because we were 8 miles away and I had some school friends waiting for me at the finish line.

When we continued, we rode along the Santa Monica pier (the path was literally paved on the beach with sand on both sides) and we followed Jerry to a different path than the guide so we could skip the final hill. Little did we know skipping this hill would also skip the lovely fans waiting for us at the finish line. We came to the finish line from the opposite direction and started looking earnestly for the friends who were supposed to be there. Suddenly they came running out of nowhere saying they had been lined up the other side of the street where "everyone else had come." Oops.

I was blessed to have about 12 friends from UCLA come and see me at the finish line, and we enjoyed food and the closing ceremony and got medals! Now that I'm at school, I'm putting my bike back in the garage. I think I've biked enough to last me the rest of the year.

Posted by Evelyn at 11:15 PM