The Team Comes Together

Here's my bike all green and clean.

With the arrival of sister Catherine from Sweden and with the shortening time window before we leave, the pieces of the team are coming together nicely.  One of my big concerns has been the support driver.  The fallback plan was to pull friends and relatives in to do different legs of the trip but we really wanted to have a committed and seasoned driver for the whole trip (seasoned at least by the end of the trip!).
In the search for a missing chain link, that was the final part needed to get my bicycle back together after its paint job, I ended up going to 4 bike shops in a mad hunt.  At one of the shops, the young man helping me expressed a lot of interest in the ride and when I told him we needed a driver, he jumped on it.  We have met 3 times since then, he's driven the van with the trailer attached, he's a certified bicycle mechanic, he did a lot of video in high school and he's thrilled to be part of the team.  We are excited to have Sean Eagleton join us!
Spokey from The Bicycle Works in Marin County is our master mechanic who has been building the bikes.  He will also join us for the first two weeks of the trip.  He will not only be great at working the bugs out but he is also an incredibly sweet guy and we look forward to enjoying his company for the first part of the ride.
Dave is an electric bicycle builder who we have yet to meet but he started corresponding with us quite a while back and said he wanted to join us for as long as he could.  I just got off the phone with him and we set up a meeting prior to our leaving date.  We both agreed this is kind of like a blind date!
Since the success of this trip relies heavily on accepting what "the gods" send, I know there is a good reason for Dave to join us and I'm looking forward to seeing that reason unfold.
Here's a link to some press we got during our visit to Marin on Tuesday.   http://www.marinij.com/sananselmo/ci_14645261