Friday, July 20, 2007

Toby & Sarah, and Mary's Peak

We've hosted a number of couch surfers since we first started doing our own surfing in Australia. It's been a really cool experience. For the most part, they're travelers from within the US. We hosted a guy who was bicycling around the circumference of the US. A guy who was riding his scooter from Oklahoma (his Vesploration tour), and since moved to Eugene. Then there was the mountain unicyclist ... I need to get in touch with that guy. He was going to come back up this way this summer to do some riding. All very cool people, and we've done an absolutely terrible job of documenting their visits.

This last weekend we hosted Toby & Sarah, from Munich. They don't have much detail in their online profile, but we did see a tiny little "mtb" under interests. So naturally, we offered to take them on a ride. So where do you take a couple with a guy who mountain bikes, and a woman who's never ridden singletrack? Mary's Peak, of course.

It wasn't until we got to the top, and Gregg was describing the descent, that it started to occur to him that the descent he'd selected wasn't really appropriate for a beginner mountain biker. So Sarah and I went back down the up direction, and left the guys to take the steeper more challenging descent. Sarah was absolutely a champ. She did great going up and down. In fact she rode a lot of stuff that most of the beginner MTBers I know wouldn't have ridden. Good for you Sarah. You totally rock!

Some friends of ours were having a Tour de France party that night, so we dragged our exhausted guests out with us. We were watching tape (TiVo) of the stage that ended in the morning, so Toby had already the spoilers and new who the winner was. Still, they were pretty happy to celebrate Linus Gerdemann's win of Stage 7!

I'm sure they'd have loved to get back to the house and let their heads hit pillows, but they were too polite to suggets it. So instead we watched most of Dust To Glory. If you've never seen it, it's a really well done documentary of the Baja 1000 race.

We started the day shopping at the outdoor store and cruising the Saturday Market, climbed up to the top of Mary's Peak and back down again, and after cleaning up and relaxing for a bit, ended up with dinner and a party over at Erik & Christine's place. A VERY long day for our German guests. They were great company, and really cool to meet. And Sarah taught me to smile :) I hope they enjoyed their stay with us as much as we enjoyed meeting them.

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