 Hello dream riders and welcome to the dream ride challenge. I'm Debbie Brubaker, the ride director for the California dream ride and joining me today is Dave Snyder who's the executive director of Cal bike and John Riddle who is the dream ride navigator. So thank you so much for joining us on this dream ride challenge as we ride together separately yet together over the next 11 days. We have a lot of fun in store for you and are really excited to get this ride going. I'll turn the mic over now to Dave who's going to say a few words about Cal bike. Hi everybody, I really wish that I could join you on the dream ride that starts in Santa Barbara and ends in Oceanside and has five days of absolutely gorgeous riding. But this is a different year. We are doing the dream ride challenge instead it is still a really important fundraiser for us. Thank you so much for riding. I'm going to enjoy riding in my own community on the streets that I know and love and raise money for our work. It's really important that we get this support. Next year we have a very important year. As you know, the pandemic has made bicycling a more important thing for everybody as a way to safely and essentially travel and we are going to take advantage of that with a very ambitious agenda next year. We are going to continue our work on complete streets to make sure that Caltrans always puts in a bike lane when they repave a street. That's essential and we're making progress on that with brand new leadership at Caltrans. It's very exciting. So importantly, we're going to help get bikes into the hands of people who might not be able to get a high quality bike, an e-bike in particular, we're going to get a subsidy, a purchase incentive for e-bikes like exists in some of the most bike friendly European countries here in California so that a lot more people can ditch their cars in favor of a bike for their trips. And then finally, as you know, public transit is really important for our mission of making the streets safer for people who ride bikes by getting cars off the streets. And in order for public transit to work, the bike share system that can be the last mile has to work and has to be accessible. So we are going to work to win a program that will make bike share available and accessible to everybody in every community, especially low income and disadvantaged communities where they can't necessarily afford to do the bike share, it's going to be available as part of public transit. And it's really exciting that we can support public transit and make biking available to everybody. It's a really ambitious agenda, it's going to take a lot of work and I'm confident that my amazing team at Cow Bike can get that done thanks to the support from people like you who are doing this right. And thanks to the support from Debbie and John. John is our famous ride navigator and leader, the one who's at the front of the ride. Usually I'm going to miss John riding with you. But I'm really glad that you are here on the screen and we get to ride together separately. So John Riddle, take it away. Thank you Dave. Hi everyone. Like Dave, I truly miss riding with you. But in 2021 hopefully we'll be able to hit the pavement and do a wonderful five day bike tour in October. What I want to do is give you a very, very brief reminder overview of what we're doing in Dream Ride Challenge. It's a design at yourself so you have total freedom here to build a kind of bike tour that you would want to do. We have, it runs for nine days from October 3rd to October 11th. Our goal is to ride 300 miles. Of course, I have nine days to do it. We can ride it any way, anywhere, any how we want, total up to us. Plus we can earn bonus miles by helping build and support our local bicycling community. So what to expect? Well during the challenge, the first thing you want to do is watch your email inbox. We sent along with this email a brief safety orientation. It's a printed document. We encourage everyone to review that. We found that it's a really good idea if we're all on the same safety page when we get out there and start riding. Also watch your email box for daily updates about cool stuff that's happening on the challenge. We're also going to be posting daily pop-up challenges where you can earn extra special miles doing really fun things. Debbie and I are going to be available the entire week for any kind of support you might need. Advice, encouragement, if you need to like think up a new ride to do, please contact us and our contact phone numbers and emails are going to be in this email someplace. So please, if you need something, reach out. We have a total of four Zoom celebrations scheduled for the next 11 days. The first one is Saturday the 3rd from 8.30 to 9.30. It's kind of a kickoff Q&A, just informal if you want to stop by online and say hi to us. We're going to be around for that hour. On Monday the 5th, we have a happy hour mixer conversation with three California cyclists. I think you'll find all three of these women very interesting. They have compelling stories to tell that on Thursday the 8th again from 5.30 to 6.30 we have a happy hour mixer with three guys who have really, really represent grassroots advocacy. They've started things from the ground up and they've built these very amazing contributions to our bicycling community. You really want to hear those three guys. On Sunday the 11th, 5.30 to 6.30, it's our end of challenge celebration. We have a guest speaker that again, this guy, he's been in bicycling for probably as long as I've owned a bike. He essentially was at the moment mountain biking became mountain biking, a thing. He was there, so it's going to be a really great conversation with him. Those are our online activities. Please share your experiences. As Dave said, COVID-19 has made 2020 a year like no other and some would say it's a year we probably don't really want to remember very well, but for us the real disappointing thing is that we can't do big bicycling events, we just can't. But that doesn't mean we can't help build friendships and community and we really need to turn to our social media platforms and our online stuff to make that happen over the next nine days. So we encourage you to post photos, videos, comments on Facebook. We also encourage you to use our Strava Bicycling Club. It's called Cal Bike Cycling Club on Strava. It's a very easy platform to use, it's very user-friendly. I really like it. Plus you can see all the places people have written, there's little maps and so forth. Encourage you to share. If you don't feel comfortable posting there, please just email Debbie or myself anything you'd like to share and we'll make sure it gets shared with the groups. Finally on the sharing experiences end, we have a page on the DreamRide website where you can record your miles and that is at cadreamride.org backslash report your miles. It's a very simple template, just type the stuff in, it takes two seconds, maybe three seconds. And then you can follow your results on the leaderboard that's there as well. So we encourage you to do that. It makes it a little bit of a competition. We're not really competitive people but it is kind of fun to see what we're all doing. And the final thing I would like to say is a giant shout out, thank you to our sponsors and we have Sierra Nevada Primal Cliff Bar People, Bicycle Coffee Company, Visit Oceanside, Yuba Cycles, and Adventure Cycling Association. These companies have stepped up and have really helped make DreamRide better. Thank you so much for joining us on DreamRide Challenge 2020 and I look forward to riding with you someday soon. Great. Thank you so much, John. And I'd like to reiterate what both Dave and John have said and just to thank you so much for joining us. We're really excited to be able to put this event on and we look forward to seeing all of your pictures and your posts and your face on Zoom. So join us on Saturday morning and again on Tuesday. Thank you again. Bye, everyone.