Undone

Last Saturday night I stood in the deserted kitchen of a large church in Seattle. With the help of my teammates (who now are closer to family than teammates), I slowly disassembled my bicycle. I removed the pedals, handlebars, and seat, remounted the stem, and then placed everything in a large bike box ready to be shipped. Each turn of the Allen wrench was a vivid reminder that the summer adventure had come to an end, but still I found myself laughing as I remembered the events of the summer with my friends. It was one of those moments where you are supposed to be happy because it happened, not sad because it’s over…but sometimes that’s hard to do. It’s a little crazy that in a matter of 40 minutes I could completely undo the vehicle that brought me up the entire Pacific Coast.

There are other parts of this summer that will not be undone quite so quickly. My new tan lines, for example, will be with me for many weeks, and although it’s starting to fade, the grease from changing 15 flat tires in 5 weeks still stains my hands. Soon (hopefully) my body will realize that I’m not biking 80+ miles a day and it will no longer require me to eat gobs of peanut butter on everything. All these things will fade in time; I’ll probably even forget just how much my butt hurt.

But there are other things from this trip that will never be undone. I hope I never forget the love of my teammates and I hope they all know that I would do anything for them. The generosity of the church is also etched in my mind after this ride and I will not soon forget the beauty of God’s creation that I experienced through ocean views, mountaintop landscapes and my teammates.

I’m back in the “real world” and it’s full of distractions like schoolwork, mail, and bills. Those things, however, cannot undo my summer, and for that I am extremely thankful!

Some days

Some days are great. Like Monday when we rode a century into Newburg, OR. We rode together all day and drafted off eachother. We made it to or destination before 4 o'clock and enjoyed a delicious barbecue.

Some days are not so great. Like yesterday when we rode another century. As a team we had 9 flat tires (only two were mine), two dropped chains (only 1 was mine), one nasty fall with a cracked helmet, and one broken derailer. We didn't make it to the church until after 8...that means we spent more than 12 hours the bike.

Even though it was a long day I still had a good time riding and laughing with my teammates, and by the time morning rolled around we were all ready to do it again.

Harder Than I Thought

This is going to be harder than I thought.

Not the riding.  Sure, that's difficult but that's what I expected of the riding - I wanted it to be a challenge.  The hard part is going to be leaving this life of simplicity in a few weeks.  These are just a few of the many, many things that I will miss when this adventure is over:

Being absolutely physically exhausted
Falling asleep in random places like coffee shops, the dinner table and museum floors
Family dinners
Eating all the time
Doing laundry with other people
Cloudy mountain top sanctuaries
Beautiful coastal views
Going ridiculously fast down a mountain on my bicycle
Aaron's animated stories
Abby's sarcasm
Chris's directions
Deb's hard work
Elizabeth's accents
Eva's cooking
Kyle's love of flowers
Lisa's jokes
Margie's questions
Morning devotions and silent rides
Toasting
Inside jokes
Hearing people's stories
The headwind (okay, maybe I wont miss the headwind, but I will miss drafting with my teammates)
Waking up to the sound of air mattresses being deflated
Eating string cheese and honey sandwiches

And the list could go on and on...

Hello Oregon!

On Thursday we crossed the border into Oregon.  We were met by a magnificent coastline, beautiful trees, and a nasty headwind.  The wind would literally cause us to stand still in our tracks and bump into teammates.   The wind was not the only opposition we had; we also had plenty of climbing.  To pass the time as we were climbing in the wind Margie and I practiced our exclamations.  Even going downhill we felt the effects of the wind and at times were only able to go 14 mph even though we were pedaling hard.  The ride made me appreciate my team even more because there is no way we could have finished the ride individually, but as a group we were able to draft and take turns pulling each other.  I have a great team!

Gravel

Wednesday started out fairly normal.  We had a good sized climb in the beginning of the day, and then of course a good sized downhill :)  After that we reached a crazy-steep climb with all sorts of switchbacks.  Eventually we made it to the top and we were all excited to go down the mountain, but to our great dismay the road turned into gravel.  You can't really zip down a gravel road on a road bike.  The whole way down we were clutching our breaks and fishtailing our bikes.  It would have been a lot of fun if we were on mountain bikes, but my bike just isn't made for those kinds of bumps.  Once we got to the bottom we thought we would be greeted with pavement again, but that was not the case.  We started climbing the next gravel mountain road and made it a few miles before the sag van came to get us.  There ended up being 30 miles of gravel/mud roads that were single lane, scarily steep (by that I mean the van breaks were literally smoking when we reached the bottom of the hill), and insanely foggy...so the whole team was glad for a little help from the van.  Once we got past the sketchy roads we got back out of the van and road about 60 miles.  We went through the Redwood forest, saw wild elk, and made it back to the coast to watch the sunset at the beach.