Palmdale Build Day.

Today was our last build day, but by far the best!

We worked alongside with youth builds from Palmdale and East LA. Palmdale was working on a housing complex for homeless youth build students including a wing for teen moms. In the center was a community center for the surrounding neighborhood. We split into teams, some people were tearing down drywall in the housing wing, some were painting the outside. I was framing and sheeting the walls for the community center. When we started, two walls were up. We framed the remaining two and then put up sheeting on almost the entire building. I felt like we knew what we were doing, and the leaders seemed to trust us to get things done right. We worked and I got a nice blister to prove it.

When we got back from the host, we were surprised with one of the Bike & Build directors biking in to meet us. He flew into Santa Barbara the day before and cycled the 120 miles to Palmdale with all his stuff to meet us. Later on one of the other directors, Natalie also made it out. We were glad to have them back. Our host grilled up hamburgers and hot dogs for dinner which was also awesome.

We had final discussions on who would be the recipients of the money we were allotted. Bike & Build has 4 ways of distributing money one of which being competitive grants which the riders help choose who receives the money and how much. We had a very democratic process that was relatively painless.  It was nice to be done with that and be able to enjoy the rest of the night and trip not having to worry about it. We watched a lot of videos we made this summer partially to show Natalie and Justin and also because it had been a long time since we watched ,most of them.

Our last week of riding was all pretty short so we made the most of our nights knowing we could sleep in the next mornings.