flanhoodles:: You shouldn't be able to drive for 9 hours and be in the same state the whole time.

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

You shouldn't be able to drive for 9 hours and be in the same state the whole time.

After spending 9 hours in a car on Thursday (plus some time standing on I-5 due to a tire blow out) and 8 hours in a car on Sunday, I was ready for a good workout yesterday.

I did arm weights and went to spin class. Spin felt less like torture that it had been lately; I think because I actually got outdoors on my bike this weekend. I think I can only handle just spinning for so long before I snap and it seems like the worst thing ever. Even though I love my spin instructor.

For weightlifting lately, I've been trying to do mainly free weights instead of weight machines. I think that I'm getting stronger faster, but maybe that's all in my imagination. I've kind of slacked on keeping track of how much I've been lifting, so I need to start that again.

On a different subject:

When you picture California, do you immediately think of this?

Or this?

The fact that I live in Lake Taco and my boyfriend lives in Santa Barbara means that I spend a lot of time driving through the state. While it's perfectly true that California has palm trees, sandy beaches and plenty of "celebrities", California offers so much more.

One of the (many) nice things about spring is the fact that I could do the whole drive in the daylight hours. So here it is, a picture tour of the (non-beachy) parts of California:

Heading out of the Lake Tahoe Basin.

Highway 50 is windy, narrow and gorgeous

The American River running along

Now we're into the really gorgeous part of California. The Central Valley.

Psych! The Central Valley is long and pretty boring. I also got to drive through a windstorm next to a CAFO. That was a lovely 15 minutes of driving through wind-blown cow shit.

This is about an hour before I had a blow out doing 75 mph. Scary! Luckily, a nice man named Pedro who barely spoke English stopped an helped me. He pointed to my tire and said, "No es bueno." Even with my limited Spanish skills, I knew what that meant. But he quickly changed my tire and I was on my way again. Yay for Strawberry's full-size spare!

Now that's something that's recognizably Californian - In-n-Out. Sorry about the blurry picture. I was trying to be a little bit safe with my picture taking/driving and didn't really worry about focusing too much.

I'm getting so close! Only two more hours. This is just outside of San Luis Obispo. Some people might think I'm crazy, but I think that SLO is one of the prettiest parts of Cali. My PNW soul just loves the green.