Day 5 first day with bikes

Me and my inability to sleep worth a damn, so I was up at 5:00 and trying not to disturb Paul. I set the computer up in the bathroom and downloaded the pictures from my phone, labeled them, and put them in their folders. Then I won't have any work to do when I get home from the trip 😁. We'll see if I keep it up.

I love the room in our monastery. It's very simply furnished. The breakfast was wonderful. We met our guides at 10:00 for our orientation. It seems that Paul and I are the only ones who selected regular bikes, as opposed to e-bikes.

We assembled our brims onto our helmets, and were issued a lock and a trunk. I have my first-aid kit in mine. The GPX route slips work like a dream. The phone tells me verbally the navigation and the Garmin shows me a map that's very easy to follow. The first ride this morning was just an 8 mile flat ride, mostly for the people on e-bikes to get used to using them.

 We went to a little restaurant that was recommended to us and I thought what I ordered was a shrimp burrito or tostada. It was called camaron tortilla. What I actually got was a fritter of scrambled eggs with shrimp. Tasted fine but wasn't what I thought it was. Paul ordered ham and beans and it turned out to be scrambled eggs with ham and beans with bacon. It was good but not what we thought, either!

We returned for round two and our second ride of the day, which was a hillier ride. The leader said they thought we should switch to e-bikes, but we wanted to try this other ride to see if it was difficult. It was only 600 feet of climbing, so we didn't think we'd have any trouble and we didn't. So we think we'll stick with the regular bikes. We need the work-outs!

We totaled out at 24 mi and 1,000 ft of climbing. The Fitbit shows 14,600 steps so far.

Our big clunky heavy key.

Several of us meet for drinks at 5 in the bar, our orientation started at 7, and  dinner at 8. So late! And it lasted until 10p. The community has a fair that starts at 10pm. Wow, so late! We walked over and the crowd was really dense so we gave up on checking it out. Between the crowd and COVID exposure....

We came back and started packing. Tomorrow we have to be up at 6:30 to dress/pack and get our luggage outside, go to breakfast at 7:30, and start riding at 8:30. We have 2, 20 mile rides ahead with 2700 feet of climbing. Might be tough, but we have all day.