The Pacific

Hell of a ride.

A day in the life, Part III: Post-ride

This is a common scene to witness if you’re not the first person to arrive at the evening’s host location.

Of course, snacking can begin before or after the obligatory nap, and more than once I’ve passed out mid-Snickers.

A day in the life, Part II: The ride

As you have probably guessed, my dear six readers, the recent occurrences of internet availability and the energy to write things have not been overlapping very much. Please accept my apologies. Now then:

As much as we’ve managed to get the morning down to a smooth routine—regular and devoid of wild and unexpected twists and turns—all semblance of predictability goes out the window when we hit the road. Adventures are frequent and vary in excitement, but no two riding days so far have been alike.

A day in the life, Part I: Pre-ride

Because this grand adventure is but a series of thousands of everyday mundanities, and because it’s very hard to convey what all of this is really like through the mere depiction of a few spectacular moments, I thought I’d blabber on for a bit about what a typical day in the life of a Bike & Builder is like nowadays. For easier digestibility, this will be broken up into three parts.

State lines and dead armadillos

That’s what I’m seeing a lot of lately. Today finds us in Arkansas, having crossed here from Mississippi, there from Alabama, and there from Georgia. And all along the way I’ve yet to see an un-flattened or un-exploded armadillo on the side of the road.

Internet availability has obviously been lousy lately, and there’s a longer post brewing, I promise, but for now suffice it to say that I’m well and happy and getting very tan and here’s a new video made by the Habitat for Humanity of Morgan County, Alabama.

107 miles into Oklahoma tomorrow!

More fame

Build day #3 today – Decatur, Alabama. And of course, the requisite media coverage. (Though this time my video appearance is sadly limited to a loitering cameo in the background).

Send me mail!

Gets lonely on the road sometimes… letters and little things from wonderful people back home are always welcome. See here for instructions on how to label stuff you send, and a list of dates/addresses to send it to (remember I’m on the South Carolina route).

Hello, Central Time Zone!

Today was my turn to submit an entry for the group journal. This is what I wrote.

Between brushing your teeth and pumping up your tires every morning, between breakfast and lunch, between pedal revolutions and hammer strokes, between point A and point B, between the myriad of tiny mundane proceedings that have filled every day of the past two weeks, it’s been easy for me to forget the epic nature of what we’re all doing.

Even the phrase “biking across the country” has been used so many times recently that the accomplishment it signifies seems to have been equated with something like “reading a book” or “making a sandwich.”

Build day Olympics

What would a build day be without some creative procrastination?

It was a fun day. We got to demolish some walls in a project to gut and renovate this raggedy Athens, Georgia apartment building. By the end of the day we were all covered in drywall dust and looked really badass. Then we came back to the church and ate Nutella out of the jar for a pre-dinner snack.

Don’t we look cute?

Evidence

We decided that we want to have a central location for to dump our photos from the escapades. Hopefully, we’ll actually be uploading things there from time to time: http://picasaweb.google.com/sc2sc10

Also, we’re keeping a trip journal, and every day someone new is in charge of writing an entry. My turn hasn’t come up yet, but there’s already plenty of detailed day-by-day narrative goodness composed: http://bikeandbuild.org/bb2/journals/blogs/SC2SC.php/2010/