I woke up before Rachel and slipped inside. Ashley poked up from the couch and Josh emerged from his nightrobe; I felt a little like St. Nick popping down a chimney to kids waiting under the Christmas tree. We held a pre-breakfast science lesson with the Sol Cycles. Ashley named the purple one Sunny, appropriately, and she had the bicycle moving in the weak 8 am light. She and her brothers are being homeschooled, so her assignment for the morning was to write an essay on it. Awesome! (Ashley, if you’re reading, we’d love to see it!)

After breakfast burritos, we rode out with Rick, their grandfather. He took us up Larkin road and talked a little about “world’s smallest mountain range,” the Sutter Buttes.

In Live Oak, we found Penny Candy. Sugar sugar sugar sugar baby.

Eventually we made it sixty miles to Sierra Nevada, the first in our brewery tour of America. Rachel conducted a solubility experiment, for science of course, comparing nitro and CO2 stouts (see right).

Big burgers, two tasters laster, we wandered over to the store to see if they had bike jerseys (they didn’t) and ran into their Earth Day celebration. They were showing “The Little Things,” a documentary about some environmentally-conscious? snowboarders. I can’t say I’d recommend it. There were a couple of stories that spoke to innovative ways to alter lifestyles and positively impact the earth, but mostly it felt like the director shopped around to a bunch of his/her friends and asked if they knew anyone doing something along Earth Day lines. Like there were a lot of "tiny house" examples. Eh, it was a free movie and there was free popcorn.

We hung out at the Naked Coffee Lounge for a while, propped our legs up on the tables and bit into the internet.

Our couchsurfing host, Raymahh, returned from Muay Thai class around 10:30; she had the whole set up going: mattresses and couches for us in the living room, which we took advantage of fast.