Day 34 – Vacation Assessment…B

14.5 lbs lost
We wrapped up our vacation after 6 days and 1100 miles logged on our trusty minivan, Vandela. We managed to squeeze in Disneyland, a visit with friends, the Reagan Library, Santa Barbara and finally a quick swing by Pismo Beach. It was such a good time and overall the diet went fairly well. I stayed on plan all breakfasts, snacks and lunches. Dinners were harder as I never really knew what hidden calories were in the meal. On the night at our friend’s house, I made the choice to eat the authentic Mexican food that our hosts had been cooking all day in honor of our visit. It was too die for and after seeing the vast amounts of oil, cream and cheese that went into the meal, I didn’t even hazard a guess. It was better to just choose to enjoy a small portion. We even managed to get in lots of walking and a quad bike ride on the beach in Santa Barbara. My husband coined this my “biggest looser moment” as this is not something we would typically do. My poor husband was fighting a terrible cold during the trip and still agreed to do the quad ride with a fever and cough to give me my BL moment. I must have had crazy eyes to make him not question my request.

Man was it hard to peddle four people along the 5 miles of beach path. My kids kept pooping out on the peddling and my youngest couldn’t even reach the peddles without standing up. We kept screaming for them to peddle as we lumbered along at a snails pace. In that moment I had a flashback to when I was about 14 and my mom bought a totally cool retro tandem bike at a garage sale. That summer, we set off one fine afternoon to ride that bike all over the lake islands where she lived. 10 minutes into the grand adventure I was broken out in a full sweat and standing to peddle. At first I thought the gears were broken or something. Then, I looked behind me to see my mom not peddling as she was ogling people’s yard ornaments and flower selections. “Mom, peddle!” I grunted. Each time she would kick in for about 5 minutes and then go right back to forgetting to peddle when a new lawn flag appeared. Frustrated, I put her in the front thinking now she would have to peddle. Nope! Didn’t make a difference as she was unable to sightsee and peddle at the same time. Peddling disorder, I’m sure we could find it if we looked it up. Needless to say, we didn’t ride the bike all that often that summer….. However, I would definitely rent bikes on the beach again but maybe singles instead of a quad.