We spent the weekend (Friday and Saturday night) in Bellevue, a suburb of Seattle. We had an interesting time coming into Seattle, since we got fairly lost and had to keep asking for directions. Everyone was tired, Paul had a flat, and our group split up when some of us slowed down on a hill.

We eventually made it into Bellevue, and I was part of the first group to find the church (it's like winning a scavenger hunt). Bellevue has some really nice bike paths with a ton of cyclists, and a guy named Randy on carbon fiber Colnago guided us around for a bit.

After dinner (which I missed since I was out in the van picking up stragglers who had a tire blowout... but they saved a plate for me), Chris' aunt Ann took us out to see Spiderman 2, and then we came back to the church and crashed.

On our day off, I spent about 45 minutes waiting for a bus, and then gave up and decided to ride my bike into the city. I was trying to find a particular bike shop, so I got in a nice little 40 mile ride... so much for resting. I did get to see some Shakespeare in the Park, ride around the Univ. of Washington campus, watch a drawbridge go up (the what-a-cool-feat-of-engineering kind that lets tall boats pass, not the kind that keeps the black knight at bay), and spent too much money at the bike shop.

Today, we rode from Bellevue to Seattle, and we seemed to have even more snafus than usual. To start the morning off right, we had a flat trailer tire, and the spare has a bent rim. Tommy and I called about 30 tire places trying to find one that's open on a Sunday with no luck, so we ended up loading all of the personal bags into the van and leaving the trailer at the church; someone will have to drive back tomorrow and get the tire fixed.

We expected to get lost a lot, since complicated urban directions never seem to work out quite right, but we managed to stay on track with the help of a few friendly cyclists.

We were cruising along on a nice shoulderless stretch of road when we came upon a set of railroad tracks that crossed the road at an obtuse angle. All cyclists know that you should try to cross tracks at a right angle, but riding in a paceline with cars whizzing by didn't quite make that possible, so Dan, Doug, and Kartik went down. Up ahead another hundred yards, Hogan was turning around to look at what happened, and he crashed as well.

Nobody was hurt, but the bikes got a little banged up; Hogan bent his deraileur and had to sag the next 30 miles, Kartik broke the arm off his aero bars, and Doug's left shifter is screwed up (hopefully it's fixable, because shifters aren't cheap).

We had a nice dinner at Lake McMurray, about 12 miles from our destination, and a bunch of people went swimming and played king of the dock on a slippery floating dock out in the lake; hilarious video footage available from Skipper.