Barstow/ Calico ghost town

I wish I had better words to describe just how amaizing tonight turned out to be.
Today we had another long hot ride through the desert. The ride was particularly long and hot for me because I was stuck riding sweep for the fourth time this trip. Riding sweep meant that I had to ride behind everyone to make sure they all got in alright. This means that we end up having to stop anytime someone gets a flat towards the end of the pack. This isn’t useally a problem, but today one of our riders had a problem getting alot of flats. I think Chris had three flats before we even left the host site in the morning. We didn’t actually end up leaving until well after a half an hour after everyone else had left. This really set the stage for the day, because with that big a gap between us and the rest of the riders, we didn’t actually see any of the other riders on the road at all today.
The other problem we had with the ride was that it ended up being almost entirely on the interstate. We had a rather short day only having to go 57 miles, however we were only expecting the first 7 miles to be on the interstate. When we got to our exit though we found out that the road we were supposed to be taking that would parrallel the interstate really didn’t exist. So our only real option was to get back on the interstate.
So you can probably guess just excited I was to get into out campsite just to discover that it had no shade, we couldn’t set up the tents yet because of the relentless wind, and everyone had already left our barren campsite to explore the ghost town. After a few minutes of cursing clafornia, and it’s desert heat, I finally decided to walk to the ghost town. I decided I didn’t want to spend a half an hour walking there on the roads so I took a shorcut strait over the nearest hill to our campsite and headed I the direction of the ghost town. This was a bad idea, because I was just wearing my flipflops but I glad I did it, because I ended up arriving in the ghost town just as a group of our riders was finishing a three gallon tub of mint chocloate chip icecream they had purchased. At this point my day really began to change for the better.
After I finished the tub of icecream I learned from the other riders that they had talked to one of the ladies who worked in the ghost town, told her what we were doing, and she invited all of us back to her house in an adjoining town to go swimming in her lake. She didn’t get off of work until 5:00pm so we went back to the campsite to wait and bake in the sun. However while we were waiting, the park ranger drove up and tales to one of the girls, and when she told him about uor group and what they were doing, he ended up offering us the campsite’s bunkhouse for the evening. It turns out
At five we met Janet Jones back at her pottery shop up in the ghost town, and she drove a small group of us back to her house. It was an amaizing change in the day. We had ridden our bikes all day through the heat of the desert, seing few signs of life and even less of water. So it was quite a shock to us to arrive to Janet’s house and see a fairly large lake through her living room windows. Janet gave us a brief tour of her house showing us her garden and her tortise pen, and after that we headed out to the lake. It was really bizarre to be sitting in a lake in the midle of the desert, but at the same time felt really familiar for me, like I could have just been at any of my friends’ lake houses back in Missouri. We stayed and played in the lake for a few hours, before we headed back to the bunkhouse we were staying in. As excited as I was to have a bed for the evening, I ended up sleeping on the front porch of the bunkhouse with a few others once the temperature outside fell below the temperature inside. In all it turned out to be a great day. I never expected it to end nearly as well as it did, but things like this seem to happen on this trip so I guess by now I shouldn’t really be suprized by anything anymore.