day 5

we left the comforts of placerville with mike, sandy, & tristan to head up to south lake tahoe. biked on a nice bike path through town and out to pollock pines where we loaded up on fruits, vegetables, protein drinks and bagels! we turned onto highway 50 and had a great ride down for a bit. stopped and saw a nice waterfall on the side of the road and chatted with some people. we then started hitting some mountains which was a little slow going. we got to a gas station and asked the japanese man, who was on the phone the entire time, where the nearest campground was up the road and he said they are all still closed, so we head back a mile or two to the last campground we saw. we picked our spot, paid a reduce fee, and setup camp. we built a small fire which didn't last real long, we needed andrew, master fire builder, but it was nice for the handful of hours we had it going (it was still wet up there from the storm that passed). we prepared some dinner, mountain house chicken and rice, ate some raisins and whatever else we could scrounge up and read for the remainder of the evening. i am finishing up "3 Cups of Tea" (thanks lia), which is an amazing book and i would recommend it to everyone, super inspirational and just a great story; evan is reading "dharma bums" by mr. kerouac and i hope to read that at some point on the trip too. i then went around taking pictures of the river and trees in the area before we read some more by headlamps :) it was a nice peaceful evening and the ground was nice and soft to sleep on. we ended up going 37.5 miles