Whoo-hoo!

Dallin learned to ride his bike on Saturday! Dave said he picked it up super fast, like in 10 minutes. He's also our youngest to ride a bike without training wheels. I don't even want to tell you how old I was, but let's just say we were living on Rock Creek Dr. As you can see, he loves it. You know how much he likes to go fast. He has started by himself and done u-turns. Now we just need to work on stopping.

AMGEN Tour of California

Apparently our population almost doubled yesterday when the AMGEN Tour came here. It's the first time they've come through the north county, and it was a big deal for our little town. The kids got off school early, since half the roads were closed.

I wasn't really planning on going (I usually try to avoid big crowds when it's just me and the boys), but the school got our kids all excited about it. In fact Spencer's teacher has been showing the class footage of the race all week. Then I found out that it would be entering our town about a block or two from our house. So that definitely sounded do-able. I woke Brennan up early from his nap and put him in the stroller while the other boys rode bikes and scooters. We got there an hour early, since we didn't know exactly when they were coming, and we got front row seats right at the turn, giving us a great view and forcing the riders to slow down at least a tad so we could see them even better. I was a little concerned about boredom, waiting for an hour with nothing to do, but then some lady drove by handing out free boxes of yellow chalk for people to decorate the streets and sidewalks for the Lance Armstrong foundation. We were all pretty much covered in yellow from head to toe by the time the bikers arrived. The excitement grew as more people gathered and tons of police cars and motorcycles and photo cars and helicopters arrived.
Here's the lead group. Yesterday's race was the longest stage at 134.3 miles, and the winner did it in 5 hours 7 1/2 minutes. Lance came in 19th and remains in 4th place overall. There was a short gap, and then the main group sped by. There were tons of them, and they were going so fast around that turn. I thought they would have been more spread out than that. It looked like it was over and people were starting to leave when 2 more stragglers went by, and everyone cheered the loudest for them. The whole thing was very exciting, and it was cool to think that the fastest bikers in the world were right here in our little town.

I am not mountain biking material

Last night we went out for Dave's birthday, which is on Monday (34 years old!) He decided he wanted to go bike riding then out to dinner. So we arranged to have a babysitter come nice and early so we'd have plenty of time.

I quickly figured out that this was no relaxing bike path. I had to walk my bike up the first hill, which was very long and steep. I figured down would be easier, right? Not so. It really didn't look that steep, but it was still hard to maintain a reasonably safe speed. It was also hard to stay on the very narrow path. Sure enough, I swerved off the path, hit a rock and fell off my bike, landing in a patch of some prickly plant. I was much more cautious after that, walking whenever I didn't feel safe.

At one point we parked our bikes and hiked up a hill for an amazing view. That was my favorite part.

Dave LOVED going fast. A little too much, in fact, because right after this happy picture he flipped over his handle bars. He sprained his wrist a little and got a few scrapes, but secretly I think he enjoyed it. He's crazy about things like that and calls it a "good hurt" in the morning because it means he did something fun.

Then we drove over to the bay for dinner. There was a little bit of a wait, so we walked around the dock taking pictures. That's always fun for me.

This is one of my favorite places on earth. It wasn't even cold last night.

And since it was just the two of us, we didn't have to stress about the kids getting too close to the edge and falling in, like the people who took this picture of us were doing.

Then we watched the sunset from the huge restaurant windows. It turned out to be a lovely evening, and I'm not even that sore today.

Bike ride

Yesturday we went on a family bike ride. Brennan rode in the baby seat on the back of Dave's bike while Tyler and Dallin went in the child carrier pulled behind his bike. Spencer and I just rode our own bikes. We went on a 3-mile round trip bike path down by the beach. It was a hot day, but there were a lot of shady trees along the way. It was beautiful and felt so good.

We were going to go to the beach next, but it looked way too crowded and we were all sunned out. So we decided to go to our favorite barn and fruit stand instead. We ate ice cream (Brennan got a rock candy lollipop), played with old fashioned toys, bought peaches and fed the animals. There was some excitement when the farmers had to load up the sheep into a truck to make room for all the new baby goats. The female goats were looking pretty fat and were apparently ready to have their babies any day now. Spencer got to help by opening and closing the gate each time.