The beginning

Today we set off from Jacksonville Florida on our grand journey. We woke up early and scrambled around to pack the explosion that occurs from three days of orientation and building. Our first route meeting went by quickly. We learned that we would be going 20 miles longer than the website said because of a change in hosts. Instead of heading north to Callahan we were headed south to Palatka. We began the tradition of passing Jake the duck. He's kind of like a "rider of the day" award that fits in your camelback. Today he went to Prachi because she raised he most money. Next, we set off for the wheel dip at the end of Atlantic Ave. We met our first reroute when we ran into a street fair on the way. It wasn't a real problem since we ended up just riding most of the way any way. We took lots of pictures, frolicked in the ocean and dipped our back wheels in the Atlantic. Our leaders gave a rousing speech, we did a group cheer and we were off. I rode with Summer all day and we had no problems at first, cruising into and out of first lunch by 11 am. Bike & Build does a 90-90 rule, where if it is a 90+ mile day or a 90+ degree day you get two lunches, just to make sure we are taking enough breaks and staying hydrated.
The time between first and second lunch is when things started to get hard. The temperature was rising, shade was disappearing and we were getting tired. We thought we were lost in St. Augustine, but, just like on our snowy day, we were on the road we needed to be on. We did get yelled at by a lady on a cruiser bike, smoking as she rode with out a helmet in heavy traffic. As we thought we were lost, we had pulled out of traffic on our bikes and we were standing on the corner, clearly off our bikes, asking passerbys for directions. She rode up and started yelling at us for riding on the sidewalk... Oh well! Summer and I made it to second lunch and finally arrived at the St. John's River State College gym around 5:55pm. We showered then ate some delicious donated pizza and chili cooked by dinner crew. Lights out was at 10, but most of us were asleep by 9 pm. Overall, it was a really tough day, but I was satisfied wig myself at the end. I added 30 miles to my longest ever ride and survived to bike again!

Post Beaches

After getting back to the church and taking a (much needed, it's a lot hotter than Michigan) shower, I went outside and painted our trailer. Pictures of our artwork are coming soon, I promise! We traveled to the church across from the habitT office and had. Delicious spGhetti dinner. Thank you Bishop Golden and congregation! Post dinner I organized my bin, called home, and prepped all of my stuff for our bike day tomorrow. We have our first biking day and many people are freaking out because our first day milage went from 45ish to 76ish... Which is pretty much twice as far as I've ever traveled on Bike before :) I have confidence though, I will do my best to make it and keep everyone going, even though I'm pretty sure that I'll only be 5 feet in front of the sweeps :) Tonight we also wrote letters to our future selves. Part of my letter thanked myself for keeping my blog so updated, so we'll have to see if that reLly happened! However, I will probably not be quite as quick to update at most locations. This host has generously allowed us to use the wifi for the duration of our stay, but that won't be the case with most hosts. I promise to journal everyday without Internet, so just come talk to me when I get back and I will fill you in on the in-betweens. Lights out was at 10 for a 6 am wakeup and 9 am wheeldip. Which means that this should have been off thirty minutes ago :) Goodnight!

Into the great beyond

I absolutely wish I could put pictures on this blog. But that shall have to wait until I can get to a real computer, not just my iPod :)

Also, before you get too far into this, I have to confess that I have a problem. I accidentLly published this post too early, but I can't go back and edit the end, only the beginning. Which is why this shall now be split into two separate posts :(

First off, I need to send a ginormous thank you to Sarah, Josh, and St. Clair from Beaches Habitat for Humanity. Today was our first build day and it has set a high bar for those to follow. Beaches has purchased one acre of land and has managed to fit five duplexs on it. As the Beaches are is, well, near the beach, property costs are at a premium and they work hard to use space wisely. The houses are all in various stages of completion, which provides plenty of work for 34 willing young adults. Some groups painted ANC caulked a house that was nearing completion, some took down and repaired scaffolding from a duplex that had just been sided, some moved heavy manly loads of fencing :) my group of 12 did general framing tasks on the least completed duplex. I started the day with Josh A and Jillian pounding nails into the insect repelling greenboards. It was here that I learned the magic of the framing hammer. You can stick the nail in hands free!!! I felt so construction-ee walking Round with my giant framing hammer slamming down nails. Next, Josh, Jillian, and I cut and started putting in backer boards in the upstairs rooms. We broke for lunch, provided by Beaches. They bought us giant trays of food from Subway. It was a good day for all of the vegitarians on the trip. Beaches asked for three sections of sub to be veggie, but the orders got messed up so we got 3 TRAYS of veggie subs :) we also had some of the best peanut butter cookies thT I have had for. Long time! Yum! Then we were surprized with our first bike and build swag: tahirts from beaches! They are blue or grey or gree and say building hope on the front. After lunch we changes jobs around and I ended up framing the second story with Josh A, Noelle, and Steph. We worked with St. Clair, a habitat volunter, to put up 3 walls over the course of two hours. I had a blast working with Beahes habitat!

Its all true!

This shall be a short posting, as I am currently resting on my thermarest and lights out technically happened thirty two minutes ago. I planned on doing this blogging during our hour of free time before bed, but ended up painting the trailer until exactly 30 seconds before the lights went out. Luckily I had put everything I needed in a pile on my sleeping bag, so I was able to stumble around after and take my contacts out! Slowly but surely our trailer design is taking shape. I'll post some pics on fb when I have a chance. And I caught a tiny frog in the grass after I washed all of the paint brushes. It was adorable and super cute.
So you probably care more about what has happened over the last 48 hours than my groggy friends...basically lots of name games, ice breakers, and learning. We have had presentations on the B&B budget, donation magic(after wonderful post shower smoothies courtesy of Smothie King), ride safety, disease/health, and an awesome presenTation from Ralph of Beaches Habitat for Humanity, who we are partnering with tomorrow. Sunrise Communittee Church, our gracious hosts, donated a wonderful chicken/rib/meat bits dinner. I'm not quite sure what the meat bits were, but they looked chicken-ish and were delicious. Thank you to SCC!! Today we also played games like ninja and badger/woodchuck/some-blind-animal games. It was fantastic! I am a fabulous blind sock dodger, just in case you were wondering. We learned bike maintenance and cleaning techniques. I changed my tire from the stock brand to my gatorskins (it's a brand name... No alligators were harmed to make them...I hope!) I had a minor freak out when I thought that the tires were too big, but Prachi and Coleman helped me and we got everything figured out. We also did our "shakedown" ride. We went about ten miles to the beach. It was pretty but there were way too many stop signs. It was kinda like...pedal pedal slowing stopping pedal pedal slowing stopping. For about 3 miles...I was in the front for the ride so I got to be in the first shower group. We definitely had fun trying to find the country club that was letting us borrow their locker room. We went all over the place on tidy roads, not designed for a 15 passenger van (our van is named VAN-essa). The club was noce, but only had one women's shower (as opposed to the 5 men's showers). We finished in record time and had a very nice chat in the locker room with some of the ladies from the club. I'm sure they were surprised to enter the locker room and find us strewn about the place:) And I practiced setting up B&B tents after scrubbing a water stain Cinderella style. And my chore coup is the red jaguars and our first assignment is breakfast set-up/laundry/van cleaning.

That's all for now(since its an hour after lights out and I have a 6 am wakeup tomorrow. please deal free to ask me any questions in the comments section and I will try to answer them! I welcome comments!

Now!

In only a few short hours bike and build begins!!! The last few days have been great. We went on a wild adventure to find a beach...we did find "Jacksonville beach bop associates" "city of Jacksonville beach" Which is not a beach, but the city of Jacksonville beach's municipal services building. We finally found a beach but we couldn't find parking. My mom dropped us off and went around the block while we quick snapped a few pictures.

After beach adventure we went to Applebees.And found the only waitress that can't count to five: " you need seats for ... One, two , three, four... Four people" nope, we had five people, all in plain view :)

I'm signing off for now, ready to meet all my new friends and go on the adventure on a lifetime!

Two days to go

Today Summer, Kelsey, and I, along with my mom and brother set out for Jacksonville. Summer and Kelsey spent the night at my house last night so that we could leave bright and early. I even remembered to decorate the car (with washable window markers) although it was not quite as good as last years decorations. Nothing exciting happened until we hit the first rest top in Indiana. Hmmmm.... How should I describe this? As we pulled in to the reststop parking lot, as happens often in parking lots, the person next to us, we shall call him Camery man, after the car which he was driving,was opening his door. A normal occurrence, most would say. But not to Camery man! At this point, situations like this go one of two ways: the pulling in car stops and Camery man gets out, or Camery man slightly shuts his door and gets out as soon as we pull into the lot. Our driver stopped the car, but instead of getting out, Camery man slams his door. As we shift the contents of the van around so we can exit, we notice Camry man talking to himself...we decided to wait for him to go inside since he seemed a little upset. Next thing ya know he's staring at Summer, who is in the passenger seat, and I could hear him through the windows..."oh! Don't you just sit there smiling like this is all your spot!" except we were firmly in our spot, so technically it was our spot, not to mention we are generally happy people on our way to the adventure of a lifetime, which makes us more smiley than usual. We waited, then went in to use the restroom. And he was waiting for us when we got out! He didn't say anything, but followed us to the car. We all loaded into the car and looked over to see him sitting in his car with the door open. Politely, our new driver, Mom, waited for him to close his door...and waited...and waited. At this point we figured he was just being rude, so she slowly went. He opened his door further and started saying some choice words. Ect,ect concluding with him chasing us down the highway to flip us off :) this might have been annoying except Camery man had lots more fun. He became annoyed with a truck that passed another semi. Both semis were exceeding the speed limit, but that bit of rational information didn't stop our friend! Oh no! Camery man wanted to make sure that the poor truckers knew that he was unhappy, so he did the only logical thing: speed up, pass the semis, roll down your window and spray your water bottle in their direction. Or maybe he just thought that his rear window was dirty and was trying to clean it... Because the he only succeeded in squirting his own car with a thick mist and wasting the water that had just paid $2 for at the rest stop. Life is never dull on the road.

P.s. If you are in southern tennessee, check out Ruby falls and let me know what it's like. We have been passing signs for it for over 90 miles!

Graduation

Today is my last full day as a student at CMU.  In 26 hours I will be sitting in a row of chairs on the basketball court waiting to hear my name.  If you count preschool, I have been working towards this day for 18 years.  18 YEARS.  Ahhh!  I'm packing up all of my stuff, preparing to leave Mount Pleasant.  The weirdest thing is realizing that I won't be coming back in the fall. Every year I leave in May, but I always come back 3 months later.  This time, that isn't going to happen!  I'm saying my goodbyes to places and people.  This morning was my last Friday at the Habitat ReStore.  Over the last 2 years I've grown to love that place and all of its eccentricities.  Every time I enter the store it has completely reinvented itself.  One week we are overflowing with couches and the next we only have 2 dinning room tables to fill the entire front of the store...I will really miss that place and all of the wonderful people that I volunteer with there.   I also had to say goodbye to two of my advisors for Alpha Phi Omega.  I think that was when it really sunk in that I am leaving in less than a week.  I've been a part of APO for 3 long years.  Every year people graduate and new people take their place.  But Pam and Ford have always been there.  They are wonderful, caring people and I am going to miss them very much. 

On the plus side, I saw deer!  Summer and Maeghan (my roommates) say that this makes me a city person, but so what if I am!  There aren't a whole lot of creatures running around in the industrial park that sits behind my house.  I was very excited to see them, and even more excited when the didn't run away as I got closer.  I can't wait to see all of the crazy creatures of the southwest.  My goal is to see an armadillo or an elk.  That would be cool.  Or a roadrunner or a coyote.  Hahaha.  A coyote chasing a roadrunner would be good, but only if the coyote had a pair of cardboard wings attached to his arms and was slingshoting himself into a canyon wall (I just discoved that Cartoon Network plays Looney Tunes in the afternoons).  But really, I'm going to geek out if I see anything.

Less than two weeks to go!