I started off yesterday running some errards with my brother and putting the finishing touches on packing his car. “Packed” is a good way to put it. Somehow we managed to keep good views of all the mirrors.

My brother was actually rather excited about two days of doing nothing but driving his car. Note the smile and everything. From a text message this morning, it sounds like he’ll be at my parents’ place early this afternoon.

After he took off, I went over and checked in on all my stuff in storage. Kind of odd to have pretty much everything I own packed up and sitting in a corner.

While there, I picked up a tennis racket and built up one of my bikes to take with in the truck hopefully for the duration of the trip.

Later in the afternoon, I met up with Laura to do some clothes shopping. I found a couple polos at Old Navy and then ended up at Valley River Center looking at something like 5 different stores before finally finding a swimsuit. I kind of ended up with board shorts, but considering it’s all I could find, I’ll live. While in the mall, I stopped in Journeys and chatted with the employees there about their Crocs line for a while. We discussed the merits of the Soles United program (Crocs recycling) and found that they have the same difficulties making use of it that we do on the road. Everyone raves about the idea, but no one actually brings in shoes to be recycled.

I parked the truck for the night and hopped on my commuter bike. It felt good to cruise around Eugene again. For dinner, Mike and I hit up McMenamins on 19th and caught up on life in the past couple months. After that, we headed over to Rennies to play pool (we played 8-9 games and never even got challenged for the table. Slow night). We drank gin and tonics and watched Mr. Phelps win gold number 1. We also talked fencing for a while (the medal ceremony for the women’s sabre was on – the gold medal winner was incredibly annoying during the round). Somehow in that conversation we decided there should be a broadsword competition at the Olympics.

I ended up crashing on Mike’s couch, and he cooked pancakes this morning while we watched a cheesy infomercial for the LandRider autoshifting bike. Comes with a seat post shock absorber and everything. I’m sold.

Today Chris, Mike and I are going to ride for approximately 4 hours, and then grab dinner and maybe catch a movie or something.