Sidenotes

Photos were added to the day eight post sometime on Sunday afternoon, in case anyone read before then and is interested.

I also forgot to mention that Dad found out after the fact that at least three people on the tour got sick in the desert by the halfway point of those days, and had to drop out of the tour for a day or more. They're fine now, but it was serious enough to be debilitating and take more than 15 hours of recovery (when the next day's ride would have started). He's not sure whether they were all people who didn't "van it" at all (until becoming ill) or not, but it reinforces the hazards of desert riding. (Frankly, I'm not so sure that most of us who aren't inclined to bike 3,500 miles in early summer are surprised to hear that riding for 100+ miles through the California desert in May might not actually be good for your health.) There are about 35 people on the tour, and 15 took the van as suggested the first desert day, so if they weren't van-folks that's at least 3/20 who had significant enough problems to cost them other days of the tour. Everyone sounds ok now, but he has no regrets about taking the van part-way as recommended for some that first day.

Re Chris's comment: The Pile Drivers, as listed off to me a few days ago, are Gil, Tony, Richard (his roommate), Bob, Tom H (from MD and pictured in the "training" part of this blog), and Jose (pictured more recently). I'm sure Dad'll email me if the numbers have shifted since then, but basically there are about six of them. [edit: Dad's since amended the number to five of them, so just pick one of the names on that list to ignore. // edit #2: He said all those names are correct, so he counted wrong (maybe forgot himself) and there are in fact six of them.] I think he said that about four or five different riding sub-groups have emerged, which also sounds about right based on the number of total riders.