Arrival: So we missed Stage 1, plane crash and all.

The group we brought down included myself, Dave Sommerville, Jared Bunde, Tom Bencivengo, Tom Dolan, Tyler Matta, Brett Cleaver, Erin (who did everything for us, except pedal our bikes), and Doctor Julio from El Salvador, who has worked with the team before, and made the trip down to work with us. Tyler and Brett had never done any racing outside the states, and we decided to break ‘em in with a somewhat “easy” stage race.

Turns out Managua is like a goddamn stone’s throw from San Jose. After all that time in the airports it was like 40 minutes in the air. Monkey hotel got rid of the monkeys. Whats up with that? Our room contained two sets of bunk beds, and was about 8x10, if that. The bathroom ruled, we had no toilet seat, and you couldn’t even sit on the toilet cause there wasn’t enough room anyways, you had to sit totally sideways. We also had to fit four bikes, and four bike boxes, the rest of our luggage and us into that hole. For a week. We decided to go out and stretch our legs on the bike before the time trial, and as we got our bikes together and dressed up it started to rain, really really hard. Figuring Jared knew where he was going, as he had been to this race before, we followed him. He didn’t, and we got lost rather fast. Luckily we had car support and they helped us for a while, until we sent them off as it was too hard to keep them with us with all the traffic. So then we proceeded to get lost several more times, finally ending up at the bank of Nicaragua as it started to get dark. We called Julio to come pick us up and stayed with the security guards with the big guns. Safest place right? So we waited an hour in the dark and rain. Got to watch some good lightning. When we got picked up we were alerted to the fact that the city turns off the power in our area from 7 to 10:30PM every night this week. Awesome. We got some candles on the way home. We made it back, showered, washed the kits, and sorta unpacked by candle light. Let me tell you, no power really sucks when its hot and steamy out. Basically we would just lay in our shitty cots until 10:30 when the fan would turn on again, then fall asleep. Oh yeah, no hot water either, But cold showers in the heat was just fine.