Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Another day in paradise

Body clock finally adjusted I woke up at a half way different hour of the morning. Had my raisin bran and juice and then we met up with a lady named Kate who was taking us for a ride at half way decent 8:00am (nice change to waking up at 5:00am in the freezing cold). Kate is one of the older ladies that May coaches and is only a recent convert to the sport after playing basketball for most of her life. At the moment she is a full-time cyclist trying to break onto the pro circuit. On the schedule today was a 2hr30min undulating cruise. She took us on the most perfect ride ever. It’s the stuff dreams are made of. It was a ride around one of the lakes just outside of the town. It reminded me a lot of riding back home when you get away from civilization and it’s so peaceful and enjoyable. Except that instead of seeing kangaroos and magpies, we saw plenty of squirrels and turkey vultures (imagine if vultures swooped like our magpies….). Needless to say there were plenty of photo opportunities and I have uploaded them in the photo album. Oh, I asked Kate about the variety of powerbars which got sold in the US (I herd that there were some pretty good ones) and she told me that they had a whole variety of the things from caramel to peanut butter, peanut butter and chocolate/cookie dough, tropical fruit smoothie, apple and cinnamon, oatmeal and raisin.. and the list goes on! So I’m taking orders if anyone is interested lol. Its only $15 for a box!!! So I’m going to be hoarding them back to Aus.

Anyway, we got back a bit earlier than expected from the ride and I wanted to go for a bit longer so I took the liberty in exploring Kutztown University. The campus is absolutely huge and it is exactly the sort of thing you see in movies. They had a sports stadium and athletics field, dining halls, libraries and apartments (see photos). It would be incredible to be able to go there for uni and ride my bike around this area, it’s basically perfect.
Anyway, after our ride, we did nothing really but chill for the rest of the afternoon and did our own thing whilst Audrey and Rick picked up what is going to be our ride for the next 4 weeks. A pretty average looking ford van. The boys came over for lunch and had a pretty good time laughing at each other and bagging each other out. We are lucky that everyone is really nice and easy to get along with. Got a feeling it’s going to be hard to say goodbye to some of these people after being with them for a month if we are like this already! As soon as they got back, we ventured down to Wal-Mart. On the way, Sam spotted a supermarket type thing called ‘Kohls’ and he said that ‘they don’t even know how to spell Coles properly around here’ which was pretty funny… probably had to be there though. Wal-Mart was all that I thought it would be and o so much more. They had everything you could possibly imagine, it’s a shame I didn’t actually need anything.. Was contemplating buying myself a PSP considering that they are extremely cheap… Oh well, there’s still 4 weeks left :D. Everything there was so cheap though. Rick bought a TomTom GPS for $150 and a 10 inch digital photo frame for $150! And the food they have.. oh my god. Everything you could possibly imagine, they’ve invented. More food items to add to the list: twinkies and oreo cakes (basically a cookie cake) and chocolate skittles… interesting…Thought the whole point of them was they were fruit and not chocolate. And another thing! I can’t actually believe that they don’t sell mars bars over here, thought Americans were all about the mars bar! Obviously not…
We stopped for dinner on the way home at a pretty cool little Italian restaurant (cool in more was than one, the aircon was freezing and the waitress apparently wasn’t allowed to turn it down…my guess is that she just didn’t like us…lol.) But again, the food is great value for money. $16 for a insanely huge veal parmesana, salad, free refill drinks and garlic bread. Pretty cool hey? I know I keep commenting on it but it just shows how ridiculously overpriced things are back home. I can picture myself now, get back home and be like ‘your charging me what for that??’. After that we cruised home and had a pretty lazy night. Hit the deck at around 9:30 whilst watching the hills. Pretty pumped for racing tomorrow though. All in all, good day.

Hope all is well in Coldberra :P
Until next time,
Xo

P.S racking up a pretty good tan line already, been 2 days and already starting to see some definition… will keep you posted :P

PP.S If you have facebook, check out some cool photos at http://www.facebook.com/photos.php?id=732018242&ref=pb (add her as a friend and i'll tell her to accept you). will get around to uploading those photos eventually but internet isn't very good here

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