day 1-4

My trip started Thursday morning with a drive to Boston.  It made so much more sense to me to drive there with my bike rather than worry about buying a plane ticket and shipping my bike and all that jazz.  Of course it rained at least 70% percent of the way. We did stop at Niagra Falls which was kind of along the way, and totally worth it.  I spent a few days in Boston, doing touristy things so that was awesome. Sunday morning we left for Maine, picking up a couple other riders along the way.

First two days were orientation, so lots of talking and presentations, pretty standard somewhat boring stuff.  Its fun to me to watch people meeting for the first time because I watched it all the time working at camp. It's also somewhat annoying to me to be on the "camper" side rather than the leadership side. the second day, we took a bike tour of affordable housing in Portland.  It was really cool to hear all of the stories and the different types of developments going on.  I think  I could stand working with affordable housing some day. Day three was a build day out in the burbs of Portland. We worked on a triplex installing windows, installation, and strapping.   I was on strapping, basically attaching wood strip to the outside of the house so the siding has something to attach to.  We stayed in the same church for 3 nights, so that's different than what we will experience for the rest of the trip.

This morning was our first riding day! On paper, it was 60 miles.  What they didn't tell us was that we had a 5 mile ride to breakfast and then a 5 mile backtrack to the beach. We had a rear wheel dip in the ocean with an eventual front wheel dip in the Pacific at the end of August.  We break into groups of about 5 during the day so that we're not all bunched together. We get a cue sheet everyday that has a list of directions, where to turn, how far to go on each road, and other important information on it.  There were a couple turns that were poorly marked, so within 10 miles we had already missed a turn and had to do some backtracking. the majority of the first part of the ride was on a bike path, which would have been nice except it was gravel, or packed dirt; basically not  a very smooth comfortable ride.  Then there was a portion where we were on the road working to reconnect with the trail later. Thanks to wonderful New England roads that have way too many roads meeting at an intersection, we took too much of a slight right and again missed a turn.  By this point, my group had caught up with several  other groups who too were lost.  It took us a while and several phone calls but eventually we made it back to where we messed up so we could get back on track.  We got back on the bike trail again, which was a flat packed dirt 6 miles. This would have been great, except I was annoyed with being lost, and knew lunch was coming up soon, so I just wanted a break. 

Bike and Builders are notorious for the great act of Donation Magic. Basically at random stops along the way, we stop at businesses and try to get free stuff. Today we stopped at a DQ hoping to get some free mid-morning ice cream.  NO Bueno, but the manager was nice enough to donate $20 towards our cause.  Later after lunch, we stopped to try and score some free mini golf.  We were able to get it half off, that was another good break, but sadly I lost. 

After lunch I was mostly just wanting to keep moving and get done. Most of the way were rolling hills. All of the houses were really nice, and occasional views of the ocean were a nice sight.  the types of trees in Maine are also really nice, it seems much more green than in Ohio.  One of our trip leaders had a friend who met us about 20 miles from the finish with Popsicles and water. From there we rode straight to our host site.  I was in the first group to get to our host, so I had time to get a shower before dinner. Yay!  Since a lot of our host sites are in a church, we usually have to go somewhere else to get a shower. Today we had about a mile walk to get to a school to take showers.  It was weird because there was no one there to meet us, and we had no instructions on how to get to the showers so we ended up wandering around to find an unlocked door and then walking around inside until we found the showers. Dinner of course was great. All of the hosts have been excited to have us, and have had more than enough food.  It's nice now that once dinner is over we're pretty much free to do whatever until curfew(11).

One last piece of great news, at WalMart last night I picked up a BopIt.   Hopefully that will provide ample amount of entertainment this summer. 

Tomorrow we have another 60 mile day, and we get to cross two state lines! I've made it my goal to play the lottery in every state, so hopefully I'll be lucky tomorrow.