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.
As soon as the trailer gets in (or as soon as enough conscious people can be gathered up), we make a big human conveyor belt and transport all of our bags out of the trailer into the church. All of our food bins go into the kitchen (where more snacking happens at this point), and we find our bag and go off to claim a corner of floor somewhere. Laying out your Thermarest is the official and accepted method of designating your sleeping territory.
Sometimes we’re all in a huge school gym (this scenario is the best for optimal snore reverberations). Every now and again, we stay in a church with lots of little rooms, and then we scatter into the building’s every nook and cranny, looking for a carpeted piece or perhaps a room with air conditioning in it. On occasion, when we’ve stay in the middle of nowhere (Wagontire, OR, population: 1) our host is the great outdoors. You can see a whole lot of stars when the only source of light pollution for 100 miles around is your headlamp.
Showers are always exciting because you never know what you’re going to get. We’ve been shuttled to local high school locker rooms, formed 32-person lines to use the one available shower at the church, and even taken to people’s houses to use theirs. But nothing beats the hose shower. Every now and again, the only source of a large quantity of water is a garden hose sticking out of the side of the church. In these instances, cleaning yourself becomes both a bonding experience and a test of character. For some reason, there’s usually no “hot” spigot when it comes to hose showers, so the sound of grown men squealing like little girls can be heard all around the neighborhood. It will shock you to hear that I made up the majority of that squealing.
Laundry days are fun. Every third riding day, the chore group whose esteemed honor it is to wash everybody’s clothes that night digs the gross 20′ x 30′ tarp out of the van and spreads it outside. Then we all excavate our smelly clothes from our bags and, holding our nose shut with one hand, toss them out onto it. From there, the laundry group rolls up the tarp (you should be imagining a large burrito), and, armed with industrial-strength detergent and a bucketfull of quarters, heads to the local laundromat.
The more exciting scene takes place when laundry is brought back and tossed out in a big pile on the floor, at which point the scavenger hunt for your stuff begins. I’ve spent considerable amounts of time hunting for a t-shirt. Socks have been known to go missing for weeks and resurface magically several wash cycles later. I’ve definitely caught other people’s underwear my gloves’ velcro straps.
But I shouldn’t make it seem like eating, sleeping and fighting off bacteria invasions are the most exciting things that we do off our bike. We’ve been known, every now and then, to have a bit of energy left as we stumble into the church at the end of the ride, and sometimes venture into the town to explore what it has to offer. We’ve been to more pools (with water slides!), thrift shops, and cute diner/cafe/restaurants than one can recount, and it’s always entertaining to be that phenomenon that doubles a town’s population for an evening.
When dinnertime rolls around, it’s easy to wake up (even if you went to sleep immediately after a hefty snack). The best meals have been potlucks, when members of the community all cook up something delicious (usually enough food for about 80 people), and we proceed to devour it. And, as I’ve discovered, one can go from very hungry to very full in an little as five heaping plates.
Sometimes we give our hosts an after-dinner presentation to tell them a little bit about Bike & Build, and show them this video. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to listen to this song again.
Tuesdays should be mentioned. Tuesdays are wonderful. Tuesdays are mail drop days. Those are the days when the van swings by the post office to pick up stacks of letters and piles of packages from friends and family (most of whom seem to be rather concerned about our collective malnutrition). My mom has proudly established her position in the corps of parents from whom a box of baked goodies can be expected every week without fail, and I always set out that box in the collective “eat me” pile We graze around this pile right when the mail comes in, then continuously until dinner, then right after dinner, then intermittently between dinner and bedtime, and then again once more but rather heavily right before going to sleep. I think this activity is mandatory.
At some point in the evening you invariably remember that you meant to clean your bike that night. Of course, by that point, it’s usually 9pm and you’re stumbling over yourself, ready to collapse on your Thermarest and already grumpy but excited to ride somewhere else in the morning. So you tell yourself that you’ll do it tomorrow.
