Ryan: Second Breakfast

In my last post, I walked you through the beginning of a "typical day." The post consisted mainly of falsehoods and gross hyperbole, but that is beside the point. Now that the trip is over (yes, we ran into Mexico today, and are currently on a train back to Santa Barbara), I have time to continue the story, with the same high standards of journalism. In this installment: second breakfast.

Second breakfast, as the name suggests, is typically our fifth or sixth meal of the day, following midnight snack, pre-dawn boost, second pre-dawn boost (optional), wake-up meal, and breakfast (covered in my last post). Yes, we eat a lot, and for good reason: we've both become bulemic. It's really the way to go for true food lovers. And second breakfast is a critical part of our daily meal plan. We now take it for granted to the same degree that we do midnight snack and pre-dawn boost. But what is second breakfast, really? It's hard to say, because second breakfast cannot be defined. Like birds. What are birds? Ding!

We typically stop for second breakfast at the first market that we encounter on the day's ride. This can be anything from zero to 15 miles down the road. Counties in which the first market is more than 15 miles down the road are cited and their courthouses peed upon (*echem* Mendocino). Counties with two citations (very rare, as the courthouse peeing typically gets the message across) receive a faintly audible verbal warning and two bad cases of malnourishment at the county hospital. Anyway this is a rare occurrence, and we usually obtain second breakfast without a hitch.

Depending on what is available at the market, which could be anywhere in size from Ron's Pickup-truck-on-the-side-of-the-road Market and Tchotchky to Safeway Deluxe, we eat anything from cinnamon shoe laces and Ron's special wood chips (don't spring for the footlong redwood carving of an eagle, even if Ron insists it was made by a real "engine"... as hungry as I was, it was too much food) to milk, orange juice, six donuts, pita chips, a whole live rabbit, and Safeway's special 86,000 Calorie muffin. You may find that last sentence hard to swallow (ha ha pun), hyperbole gone out of control, but I'm not joking: Safeway really does have a 7,645,001 Calorie muffin. It's quite incredible, and it really gets us from point A to point B without fail. Unfortunately, a typical day's ride goes all the way to point J, which is why lunches one through 140 (covered individually in future installments) are so important.

Before I wrap this up (again with the puns! Just kidding, there wasn't a pun there), I just want to thank all of the readers out there in readerville: thanks readers. Threaders.

That's second breakfast. An excellent tradition, though I'm not sure how to adapt it to normal life without requiring liposuction every other day. My next post, if I find the time, will describe a typical day on the road.

See you then!