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San Diego, CA, June 16th 2005 (Day - 3)
Good evening,
It’s 7 pm, and I’m writing this email from my hotel room in…. San Diego, CA. Finally, I am at the place where in 2 days will start the Race Across America. And I can tell you that my stress has very much increased during the last 24 hours. Wednesday night, I introduced all the crew members (well, except Steve who is still in LA). It’s the first time that they met each other, and frankly, it went very well. After acknowledged them for being part of the crew, I explained them once again the project, why I was doing this race, what I was expecting from them, and finally what was my goal. It’s very simple: cross the finish line. The time limit is 12 days and 2 hours. And if I finish in 12 days 1 hours 59 minutes, I’d be the happiest man on earth, the more exhausted probably, but I would have reached my goal.
Last night was very short, and after a 3:45am wake-up call, Joel, Hervé, Jérome, Olivier and I took the plane from Boston to Long Beach, CA, with only 16 luggage's! Everything (us plus the luggage) arrived safely in Long Beach after an uneventful flight at 9:45 am, local time. We picked up the rental van and drove down to San Diego, 110 miles south. When we arrived at the RAAM headquarter hotel around 2pm, we saw for the first time the start area with all the flags, logos from sponsors, etc…which is in front of the Star of India. I have to say that I was really impressed by this area, because I only saw it on TV until today. At the hotel, I met John Delia, a friend from Connecticut who is going to do the RAAM solo this year, after having done as part of a team of 2 last year. In the afternoon, Joel took care of the bikes. The rest of the crew bought tons of carts to set up the van. The preparation of the van is extremely important, because lots of stuff goes in there, and to be honest, it can’t be a mess! I’ve got also road-books which really describe the road we are going to take between San Diego and Atlantic City. The road-book, as you can imagine, is comparable to this race, meaning huge, 181 pages of directions to follow, map to study, etc…. 2 set of the road-book will stay in the van that will follow me at all time, and one will be inside of the RV. We will have also a laptop in the van with a GPS system, which will allow us to stay on the race road. We will get Internet connection through a cell phone, from the van, to send and receive your emails, and my crew will read them to me through a 2-way radio, probably at night. All this technique has been set up by Herve, who’s been working until the last minute (he didn’t sleep at all last night!), to make sure that we could communicate with you.
This day was a long day, and there is still tons of stuff to do, in order to be ready on Sunday morning. But, tomorrow is another day, and right now, we’re going to eat something and go to sleep
Talk to you tomorrow,
Patrick
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