Today was a day of surprises to say the least. We started off doing a lot of climbing, We wound up the side of a mountain. It was really beautiful, each turn provided better and better views. I rode by myself and got into a really great climbing mentality and was able to just push out the whole thing no problem. At the top we rode through a pine forest before turning onto a new road! I was surprised yet again by a 9 mile downhill sign. Although it was mostly straight, the views the whole way down were incredible, and I loved every moment of it; I even contemplated turning around and riding back just so I could come back down again. Lunch was near the bottom of the hill. I rolled up on Andrew changing out of his normal driving clothes into his cycling gear; he wanted to experience the downhill himself too. Lunch was nothing special, and there was only a short stretch left before we were almost done.
We were being hosted by the Verde Valley Habitat and they pre-arranged to give us a police escort into town. We had our cue sheet arranged to have us all meet at WalMart before being escorted the leg. We had a couple hours to kill so we wandered around before settling into the McDonalds inside the store. We were never told where we would be sleeping that night, just that it would be a surprise and was actually in Sedona. While we were waiting a man shopping at WalMart came up to us and seemed to know everything about us boing in town and a lot about Bike&Build itself. He mentioned something about us staying at some retreat center and told us he read all about it in the newspaper. Naturally we looked the article up and turns out we were indeed staying at some spiritual Retreat center way out in the middle of no where.
Eventually it was time to leave so we all grouped up and took off for the Cottonwood ReStore. The end of our route was lined with people holding signs and cheering us on. They were clearly very excited to have us stay there. We had to stash our bikes in the ReStore and be vanned to where we were staying. It ended up being about a 20 minute ride out some dirt road outside of town to get to where we were staying, We basically stayed in hotel rooms, had our own beds and everything! It weren't any typical night before a build day activities. We swam in the pool and hot tub for a while and then we realized it was the last night of the big summer meteor shower, so Sarah, Casey, and I laid out and watched the start for a long time. In more exciting news I was walking back from the pool barefoot and managed to step on a nail and get it shoved about half an inch into my foot; that was fun to pull out.
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