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.

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.

It really can’t be exaggerated, I think, how wonderful it is to experience a country from the seat of a bicycle.  We crossed the state line into Colorado last week (okay, this particular sentence was written a while ago), and were immediately greeted by the snow-covered Rockies towering in the distance. I couldn’t help but feel like I should be paying somebody for the view. Of course, there was also the feeling that this view was well deserved, since it followed interminable and demoralizing Texas cornfields (not pictured for obvious reasons).

We don’t really ever know what any particular day will be like. We’ve ridden on bike paths and interstate highways; through towns and farms and wild rolling fields; across plains and deserts; over mountains and along rivers; in national parks and plastic suburbia. Sometimes we sweat profusely, and sometimes we can’t feel our toes. There was a day that started out in the high 30s and ended up in the mid-90s. Try dressing for that one.

We roll out in the morning in small groups, each at its own pace, to limit the number of bikes any car would have to pass at once (I think they’re all mad enough at us as it is). Throughout the day, these tend to shift (“I don’t like you any more, I’m going to go ride with Jess instead,” for instance), but we usually roll into the host location in roughly the same configuration as we had rolling out. Lately, I think a lot of us have been realizing that we’ve been riding with the same people a lot, so there’s been an observable conscious effort to slide around and ride with someone new. Keeps life interesting.

Conversation is right up there with scenery in the category of things that can make 100 miles  fly by. There was a 112-miler last week that I spent with Craig and Katie R, and there was nothing that we didn’t talk about. We had no idea where the time went when we pulled into that church. (Of course, as the universe would have it, the very next day we climbed the first 55 of 99 miles into an evil headwind, and halfway through the ride the day had already felt twice as long as the previous one).

We all carry sidewalk chalk for the purpose of chalking directions and other important messages to the people riding after us. Sometimes we get creative when indicating upcoming turns.

But I can’t really go on talking about riding without mentioning our most favorite activity, and one without which none of this would be possible. Obviously, I’m talking about eating. Now, because this word can also describe the life-sustaining activity in all of you engage on a daily basis, it seems almost as though we need to invent a new word to describe what it is that we do to food on this trip. This new word would have to combine the ferocity of “devouring” with the machine efficiency of “industrial” and the impressive scale of “astronomic.”

This is a photo of our very first lunch. And now that it’s been two months, we still don’t look any less excited when, about halfway through the ride, our van & trailer appear on the horizon, usually pulled over on the side of the road, usually with all of our food bins splayed out and ready to offer an abundance of calorific goodness. It frightens me sometimes how quickly a jar of peanut butter can go from sealed to empty, or a loaf of bread from a loaf to four crumbs, or bag of chips to just a bag. We inhale food.

And the funny part is, even if we get really full, we’re usually ready for a snack about half an hour later. Some of us pride ourselves on having an average of four to six lunches. The van will stop twice if the day’s ride is over 90 miles, but many of us like to supplement these stops with hearty in-between-lunch snacks. Gas stations are frequent haunts. Once, we rode by a smoothie place that gave us all free smoothies. I deemed the situation worthy of temporarily removing one of my water bottles.

For a week, we were spoiled by Brian P’s dad, who came out in his 1976 VW bus and drove ahead to make snack stops between lunches. He was stocked with Clif bars and Gatorade and plentiful oranges and bananas and all sorts of other goodness that left us all in extreme withdrawal as soon as he left. (Thanks, Butch! You’re sorely missed.)

Of course, not all things on the road are pretty scenery and snack breaks. Sometimes, we get flat tires (I didn’t have any in the first 2500 miles. Apparently Utah and Idaho encourage the placement of loose staples on the roads). Sometimes, our chains fall off/apart. Sometimes, our spokes snap and various other bicycle parts decide to quit. The other day, Lizzy found herself in the precarious position of being attached to her left pedal when her left pedal was no longer attached to her bike. In other words, shit happens. Luckily, with the technical and emotional support of thirty wonderful people, it’s easy to laugh most of it off.

Finally, some random things we’ve done so far while riding, condensed for your ADD reading pleasure, and because I don’t feel like writing complete sentences anymore: climbed a volcano, met astounded locals, got chased by dogs, sprayed dogs with Gatorade bottles, played paintball, zip-lined into a lake, jumped off cliffs, swam in lakes, swam in rivers (most of the time with some clothes on), fallen off at 20 mph, fallen over at zero mph, got lost (a lot), got money thrown at us out of passing cars, got yelled at out of passing cars, got hit by passing cars, played with horses, climbed abandoned trains, got pennies flattened by non-abandoned rapidly-moving trains, done a whole bunch of small, forgettable, insignificant, wonderful things, taken thousands of photos of all of the above…

And it’s not even over yet.

(First, an aside, by way of facilitating the understanding of certain logistics: All of us are divided into five groups, assigned on a weekly rotating basis to a specific set of chores or responsibilities. There’s cleanup crew, which is responsible for cleaning up the host location each morning, returning it to a respectable condition after the horde descends on it; trailer crew, charged with stuffing everyone’s stuff into the trailer every morning; cooler crew, which mixes up the Gatorade coolers for the ride and takes care of managing all of our perishables; breakfast crew, in charge of setting out and cleaning up all of our breakfast stuff, and cooking if there’s more than cereal on the agenda (this crew is also responsible for doing laundry); and dinner crew, whose job is to cook dinner if it’s not provided for us, and facilitate set-up if it is. This is our fifth week, so at this point everyone’s done everything.)

We’re in Oklahoma now, where the 110-degree heat and nasty winds in the afternoon can make any outdoor activity—especially the activity of riding directly into those nasty winds—severely unpleasant, so on the longer days we’ve taken to waking up on the obscenely early side of things. At 4:30 or 5am, typically in the gym of a middle-of-nowhere church, about twenty cell phone alarms go off, competing for obnoxiousness and prompting their owners to frantically pound and claw at all available buttons, until one by one the ringing and chiming things go quiet and a disgruntled sigh of relief echoes through the space.

At this point, someone very rude usually turns on the lights and many cranky and sore cyclists begin to emerge from their sleeping bags. The next wave of sounds starts with the buzzing of sleeping bag zippers and continues with the pop-and-hiss of Thermarests being uncorked and deflated. This step usually takes a minute or two, since the task of stuffing a sleeping bag into a sac that’s entirely too small for it, and then completely compressing an inflatable sleeping pad, is surprisingly difficult when one half of your brain is still asleep and you’re stumbling over the various articles you’ve already managed to disperse all around yourself in the brief evening that you’ve had to set up your territory.

Ruffling through my bag to locate a toothbrush with corresponding paste, I shuffle in a haze to the bathroom to splash some water on my face, and swap out the comfort of nice cotton undies for a very different sort of comfort of spandex bike shorts. Returning to my bag, I cram everything that’s not my bike into it, and take it outside for loading into the trailer. Once the trailer is all packed (our target is 20 minutes after wakeup) we’re allowed to start eating breakfast. Sometimes that’s cereal and oatmeal and donated stale bagels with peanut butter and many bananas and orange juice; sometimes we get a crazy eggs-sausage-bacon concoction whipped up by the hosts; occasionally we make ourselves some pancakes (my group made some killer blueberry ones a couple of days ago).

By this point, most of us are awake enough to be able to handle mid-sized mechanical devices without injuring ourselves. So the next object of the game becomes figuring out which of the identical-looking bikes is yours, getting it outside, pumping some air into the tires and giving it a quick once-over to make sure it won’t fall apart mid-ride. Cooler crew digs all of our food out of the fridge and packs it into the trailer, we fill up our Camelbacks with water and bottles with Gatorade, douse ourselves with sunblock, apply a generous helping of DZ Nutz and chain lube (careful not to confuse the two), and gather outside for our pre-ride meeting.

One of our four wonderful leaders is in charge of each day’s route, and puts together and prints out the requisite cue sheet with turn-by-turn directions for getting to that evening’s destination. We all grab one and clip it to our bikes. While we stretch and have a dialogue with our quads about our motivation and the meaning of life in general, the leader goes through the cue sheet to point out tricky turns, etc on the route. After a brief and always entertaining display of the Dance Move of the Day (the honor and responsibility for coming up with a Bike-&-Build-related dance move is bequeathed on a member of the group by the person who had it the day before), we all say a few kind words to our legs, apologize again to our butts, and set off.

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!

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.”

Every now again when I’m riding, I catch myself drifting off into this losing-sight-of-the-awesomeness-of-Bike-and-Build, and then make a point of reminding myself and those in the immediate vicinity just how amazingly lucky we are to be doing this. We’re barely two weeks into the trip and I’m already sad for when it will be over. But that bridge can be crossed later.

We had a wonderful day today. Before we left Scottsboro, of course, we had to swing by Alabama’s number one tourist attraction – the Unclaimed Baggage Center! It’s a unique place – kind of like a thrift store, except all of the stuff comes from baggage left unclaimed at airports for more than 90 days (so it’s actually nice stuff). While I couldn’t find any item that called to me, several of us walked out with some killer American flag bandannas, hats, fabulous sunglasses, Sesame Street books, shoes teleported from the 1980s, etc. Needless to say, we didn’t get on the road for a while.

Once we finally managed to get out the door, we were in for a beautiful ride. The weather cooperated, as did the terrain. (Which is to say, there were no thunderstorms or 4000-foot climbs.) All day we were riding through rolling hills of rural Alabama, getting barked at and/or chased by the local canine population. Good times.

When we got into Decatur, unloaded the trailer at our host church and scrubbed off multiple layers of sweat and sunblock, we headed to dinner at the world famous Big Bob Gibson’s BBQ. I opted for the stuffed baked potato – an enormous spud filled with sour cream, cheese, and a mound of pulled pork deliciousness – and we had a game of “let’s see who shall conquer whom.”

I think it was a draw.

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?

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/