We woke up and turned the alarm off and woke up and snoozed and woke up and rolled over and woke up and slept. Finally pancakes sounded too good to deny any longer, so we mixed up a couple’a batches of rice-milk-coconut-oil hot stacks with flavors like banana chocolate and matcha-green-tea-walnut. Chico just stole the first place farmer’s market straight out from under Davis (hey Davis Enterprise, what’s up with that?!), so yeah this town is crunchy.

Our host then taught us some Muay Thai as self defense -- like breaking punches with your elbows and shrimping, which can help you escape if someone’s got you held on the ground.

After some writing and some sorting, we headed off to our second class at Wildflower Open Classroom, a charter school trying to give kids independence and freedom within their school day.

The kids didn't know what to make of us at first - and actually it was more difficult to get the kids to work in groups than in the Sacramento classrooms.

I worked closely with Owen, a shy kid at first. I’ve never had dimensional analysis open kids up, but he got out his happy calculator (a scientific calculator he could make a happy face on) and we sat together as he figured out how many miles per hour the Sol Cycle could ride. At the end of class, a kindergartener came up and asked Owen what he was doing. Owen took it into the sun and handed it to the kid and let him play with it while explaining the solar panel and motor, and the kindergartener’s jaw dropped and his eyes got all wide. When we went back inside, Owen pulled out this beautiful drawing of a character named Rosalina and told us he wanted us to take it with us on our trip; those are the moments that make teaching so worth whatever stress planning brings.

That evening, our Warm Showers host Spencer showed us to the Chico’s farmer’s market, a hoot with lots of hollering when the sky turned to candy and lightning cracked. We made a run for it and ate damp pineapple, pork and veggie tamales under a construction awning. The sweet and spicy sauces were A+ bingo go time. Tomorrow: the mountains awaited.