As a storm rolls by outside, we hunker down in Mitchell's super-hostel and celebrate!
This morning Sara awoke with a plan. I, planless, made coffee and sat down to this blog. Sara marched off to Mitchell's grocery store, coming back also with pastries from the nearby bakery: these excellent chocolate laminated duders that were sold by the name of chocolatines, though upon googling that word I only see pain au chocolat, whereas these were made with chocolate dough, spun in a circle similar to a cinnamon roll. They were great. I ate most of two of them, along with a chocolate croissant. We eat. So much. Which is sometimes a pain au my ass, but that changes when in the vicinity of a good bakery.
Anyways… When Sara got back, she kicked me out of the kitchen for the day, which was fine because I was set up on a couch writing. (For a little meta-blog moment, I'm pretty sure I was then writing the section from Hailey to Mountain home. I won't tell you where I'm writing from now because: ~suspense~)
Why all Sara's secrecy? Well, I pretty much know — I turn 35 tomorrow. But tomorrow we're hitting the road, so today is her chance to bake something special (we've been watching so much Bake Off, too). And, also: this hostel has everything: cake pans, cooling racks, an electric mixer, a bench scraper… just, so much unlikely and useful stuff.
And, funny enough, baking and blogging was most of our day. We did laundry, too. We took turns in a massage chair (this hostel has... everything). I went and got more beers, then used our last two patches on our two spare tubes, both of which had holes in them that we searched out by holding them underwater (the one thing this place doesn't have is spare patch kits). But it's weird how, on days when we don't ride, there's a bit of restlessness, almost a sense of loss. It was raining today, so we wouldn't have ridden anyways. But it feels like something's missing.
Which isn't to say it wasn't a great day. We explored the big beautiful hostel, we got some writing done. And after I made us some spaghetti, Sara brought out this awesome dark chocolate mousse cake. (Her first mousse, her first royal icing, and her first ganache!)
The seven scrolls are printouts of my seven birthday presents — one part of the gifts was not having to carry them the rest of the way, but instead having them all waiting at home (we must have so many packages just waiting for us at home). And the cake was fucking excellent — I ate two large pieces. I felt ill and wonderful, in that special too-much-sugar kind of way.
And that's all for today, folks. Tomorrow we ride again. Tonight we sleep hard.
Day 78: Mitchell to Mitchell, 0 miles, 0' elevation gained, some blog entries, 1 awesome cake, one excellent place to rest