Adventures at Patagonia

5/8 - Ventura, CA (90 miles)
Our original route did not include traveling as far south as Ventura, but when we met Sierra at Joshua Tree National Park, she invited us to take showers and get a tour of the Patagonia Headquarters where she worked. This seemed like a great opportunity, so we deviated our route by traveling the Sierra Highway over the mountains, dropping into the coast north of LA. This is where the land noticably changed from desert to green velvet mountains abundant with colorful wildflowers. We met up with Sierra (pictured above) at Patagonia and got our private tour of the facility. This was somewhat akin to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; we like to think of it as Scotty & Rachey in the Patagonia Factory. We saw the secret rooms of spool and thread, yards and yards of fancy fabric, electronic-gee-whiz sowing machines, and a lot of dull rooms with computers (much like the Genome Sequencing Center where we worked). We met and talked w/ (distracted) many of the employees and were thinking "wow, what a cool place to work". At the conclusion of our tour we were surprised w/ lightweight, snuggly soft Patagonia wind-shell jackets (seen above on Rachel and Scott). As I'm writing this many weeks after the acquisition, we now can't imagine traveling w/o them. The weather is constantly changing up and down each hill of the coast (sweating your buns off on the climbs and then freezing your teets off on the down-hills). THANKS PATAGONIA!!!!!