Biking Adventure (Luisa & Magdalena)

         This morning we left our house at 8:30 to bike with a group of youth and an adult leader from the surf club to the top of Cerro San Juaquin (the highest point on San Cristóbal which is 2,400 ft). We rented bikes from the surf club and then waited for a long time. Finally we left the surf club at 9:45 to start our climb. It was a tough climb for a couple of Hoosiers who have never biked up a volcano. And surprisingly it was Magdalena who was whining the whole way up, and half of the time she was far behind the group. Even though Magdalena was the one who went on a long bike trip last summer.  While the farthest Luisa had ever gone was about 12 miles on pretty much flat land, she did fine most the time. We stopped almost every half an hour to take a breather and to munch on some delicious, invasive black raspberries.
          At 12:30 we got to the point where the road hasn't been paved yet. We weren't sure where we were supposed to turn off to go up the hill because none of us had ever go up before. So we asked the construction workers if they knew. They said we had passed it so we turned around. The first driveway had an open gate so we biked in. We passed a little building with a truck and then we saw some people ahead that were motioning for us to stop. We stopped and they said that this was their private property and that it didn't go up to the top. They said that the next drive did but it was also private property. So we went back out to the main road.
           We backtracked a little more to the next dirt drive. This one didn't have a gate so we biked in. After biking for a bit there was a gate, but it was locked with a barbed wire fence on each side. One of the boys in the group climbed over the gate and we handed the bikes over the fence to him. Everyone else in our group climbed over the gate and the two of us went through the fence.  Then a bit later we turned a corner and saw that there were about seven cows blocking the driveway. They were all watching us and we thought they might be the guards that would soon chase us away. But then they turned and walked off the drive. So then we biked a bit more and we came to another locked gate which we went over and around again. We thought for sure that there wouldn't be anymore so we continued. Soon we came to a third gate. We were getting ready to climb over again when we realized that this chain didn't have a lock on it so we opened the gate and easily went through. We took a break to eat lots of black raspberries around all the cow pies. There was not a fourth gate which we were happy about, but we still had a long way to go to get to the top.
           By the time we finally got to the very top it was almost 2:00. Because the driveway was steep dirt we walked all the way up. At the top was a big dome that looked like a huge, white soccer ball. We wanted to take a picture of the view from up there but there's no view because it's always foggy. So after taking a group picture and getting a drink we headed back down. It was a kind of scary on the way down because, again, it was steep dirt so we had to break so we wouldn't fly off the side of the hill, but when we tried to break we just skidded. It was also spritzing rain so the dirt was muddy and it got all over us. We made it back to the third gate and then the second gate and then the first again without any cow trouble, but we did have to lift our bikes over the gates again.
           Once we got back on the paved road it was downhill from there. Magdalena probably broke the speed limit most of the way down without pedaling. We got back to the surf club at about 2:45. It took four hours to go up and 40 minutes to come down. We walked the two blocks home and ate a really good lunch and showered. The trip was a lot of hard work, and we were very tired, but it was worth it!