Hanson Dam UCI

I don't know what was more exciting today, battling it out with Brent Prenzlow at the SoCal UCI race, or watching the horizon get darker and darker as the fires around LA picked up throughout the day. It was another great day of racing and today went similar to yesterday with Prenzlow, Easter and I forming a gap soon into the second lap. I think we got away from Easter late on lap two and then we worked well together keeping the gas on and staying steady. We had a good battle going on into the last lap, which I lead, Brent attacked into the last section of corners but overshot it a bit coming in too hot, we went into the next coner side by side and Brent came out ahead. Into the final steep run/ride up Brent slipped his rear wheel half a pedal stroke allowing me to jump past him into the final sweeper downhill onto the rode where I held him off the 150meters to the line - UCI career win #2!!
The rest of the day was spent cooling down and watching the smoke and dust blowing from the fires that were spreading. All morning we watched the Malibu fires spread on TV which was only about 15 miles from our hotel. Then tonight as we drove home we drove super close to another huge fire along the highway that looked really bad in pretty suburban area. The sky was just glowing and then we came around a bend to see huge flames across an entire hillside and down what looked like into the city. Tonight there are even more on the news and cities are being evacuated about 30 miles from here in Carlsbad so it is pretty bad out there. It was extremely windy and that really made it tough to race in and fight fires I guess.
Cooling down with the smoke overhead. Hopefully there is no problems at the airport tomorrow as the fires are in some areas outside of SD now and the smoke is blowing west. If so, I might have to spend some extra time near the beach.