Gravel

Wednesday started out fairly normal.  We had a good sized climb in the beginning of the day, and then of course a good sized downhill :)  After that we reached a crazy-steep climb with all sorts of switchbacks.  Eventually we made it to the top and we were all excited to go down the mountain, but to our great dismay the road turned into gravel.  You can't really zip down a gravel road on a road bike.  The whole way down we were clutching our breaks and fishtailing our bikes.  It would have been a lot of fun if we were on mountain bikes, but my bike just isn't made for those kinds of bumps.  Once we got to the bottom we thought we would be greeted with pavement again, but that was not the case.  We started climbing the next gravel mountain road and made it a few miles before the sag van came to get us.  There ended up being 30 miles of gravel/mud roads that were single lane, scarily steep (by that I mean the van breaks were literally smoking when we reached the bottom of the hill), and insanely foggy...so the whole team was glad for a little help from the van.  Once we got past the sketchy roads we got back out of the van and road about 60 miles.  We went through the Redwood forest, saw wild elk, and made it back to the coast to watch the sunset at the beach.