RatN – Early-bird Registration

This morning we woke up to a still-chilly but mercifully sunny day. Our AirBnb has a nice little kitchen space but we hadn’t had time to shop so we were left with only a few crumbs for breakfast. Already off to a good start with the planning!

We had been planning under the assumption that our race checkin was at 10:45 am but when we arrived we realized we had made a mistake. The checkin started at 1:00 pm and our slot wasn’t until 5:45 pm! Once we did the math, we realized that the checkin selection form automatically (and silently) adjusted for our time zone and had registered for 10:45 am US/central time. Very helpful indeed!

It wasn’t a total bust though because we happened to bump into the only other rider from the US, Henry: a very nice fellow from San Francisco. He had had the same issue as us but even further removed from the actual time.

So back to home base, but we stopped at the local Jumbo grocery store to pick up food for the next three meals. All sorts of interesting stuff including cute little vegan braunschweiger tubes that we had way too much fun with.

Liz cleaning up the dishes like a boss

With some time to kill, we relaxed a bit, had some herbal tea and I replaced the bar tape (I’d been carting it around all this time!) on both our bikes.

We headed back to registration and found the situation much more to our liking. Lots of camaraderie between the riders plus a bit of nervous energy. We ran into Henry again, who was happy to have made it past the bike check. Incidentally, we also passed the check which involved making sure we had quite a long list of required gear and proper reflective/safety clothing and accessories.

Tonight it’s a simple pasta and red sauce for dinner, along with a Grolsch 0.0 NA beer and some generic orange Fanta.

Tomorrow we ride!