Another biking story

"Did you know Sheryl Crowe has breast cancer?"

"That was last week's news. I should have told you." Those are not so young men talking. The one asking the question was 43-year-old me and the one who answered was Dale Law, once upon a time my English professor (when I was in school over 20 years ago) who is now my mountain biking buddy. He is 63.

What led us to talking about Sheryl was, of course, her former fiance Lance Armstrong, whom we bikers simply adore.

Our other biking buddy, Cobbie Palm, even outshines all of us in emulating our idol by donning a jersey of the Discovery Channel (Lance's cycling team) and looking just as fit, lean and as muscular as the original biking legend. When I told Cobbie what I read in the internet that Lance's heart is one third bigger than the average human heart, Cobbie heaved a sigh of relief. "So he's not normal, eh? Thanks for that information--I was starting to feel bad about myself," Cobbie laughed.

And Cobbie also usually beats all of us in the final sprint to the town of Valencia, where we end the first half of the ride with a coffee break in the market stall of Mr. and Mrs. Villegas which we call "Starbucks".

It was Dean Sinco, a graduate of the University of Washington in Seattle where Starbucks originated, who baptized the name of our "painitan" by the Valencia market, which we discovered by chance several years earlier. We stopped by one food stall one early morning looking for coffee, and they just referred us to this Villegas stall in the old part of the market. Apparently, these stalls in Valencia are into niche marketing. When we found this "Starbucks", we found that it served nothing but "painit" all day long--just like those "breakfast all day" joints --and that started our periodic pilgrimage to this site.

But Dominique Cimafranca, our resident IT expert, has a different interpretation of the name. "It should be "Starbuck" because the coffee costs only one buck." Well, actually, if we Filipinos refer to the peso as "buck", the bland coffee there costs seven bucks a glass (yes, a glass!). But because many of our biking buddies -- Mike Feeney, Dale, Cobbie -- are Americans, or -- in the case of Ruem Gregorio and Dean -- Pinoys who grew up in America, a buck is appreciated for its American value--51 pesos. And that's how much we usually pay for all our coffees combined.

"In the restaurant I used to work for in the US, that's not going to buy you even a cup of coffee--maybe just a cookie," Ruem, a retired chef, said.

The Villegases don't know it yet, but their small native "painitan" is already known in other parts of the world, too, as this is where we have brought our guests who have biked with us one time or another: Cobbie brought along his house guest, Ray Whitehead, who, at 74, biked all the way to Valencia with just one water stop along the way. Dean also recently brought along his business partner Rex Maximilian, a Hawaii-based architect, who talked about "Starbucks" in his blog at www.rexmaximilian.com. (Check it out.) Our latest guest in our favorite humble painitan was Pulitzer prize-winning photojournalist Luis Sinco of the Los Angeles Times, who gamely took our photos one early morning with his mother Foundation University President Mira Sinco as his driver/assistant. We had the rare privilege of being Lee's subjects, making us feel like we were celebrities with the likes of California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenneger, LA Lakers' Kobe Bryant, actor Jamie Foxx, and many other famous people whom Lee had taken photos of.

So now, whenever we take our coffee at "Starbucks", we just kid ourselves: "Hey, it wouldn't be a big surprise to find our photos in the LA Times one day!"*

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