On Wednesday afternoon we met in Revere, MA (just north of Boston) for a day and a half of orientation: a bike maintenance clinic, a health and safety lecture, some getting-to-know-you games, safety drills, and a shakedown ride. I was definitely getting cabin fever, itching to get on the road, but it was fun to spend some quality time with the folks I'll be spending my summer with. They all seem like absolutely awesome people, and I can't wait to get to know them all better.
Friday morning we headed over to Revere Beach and dipped our rear tires in the Atlantic...
...and after that we were off! It was a very light first day, just 22.44 miles to Andover, MA, but it was great to get on the road. It's finally started to sink in, the idea of what we've begun.
Since it was such a short ride we got into town pretty early, which meant we had time to explore a little and go swimming!
A little backstory on why our first stop was so close: Boston to Santa Barbara is a new route this year, and it was designed by two Bike and Build alums who are also two of our four trip leaders, Kyle and Jose. They designed this route as a memorial to Chris Webber, a B&B alum and later program director who was hit by a car (not on his bike) and killed a little more than a year ago. Chris grew up in Andover, and his parents still live here, which is why we made this our first stop. We're staying at a school but Joan and Bill Webber have been incredible hosts to us, inviting a huge group of rowdy and hungry kids into their home and feeding us four separate meals of fantastic home-cooked food.
Today we woke up early once again and headed just down the road to Lawrence, MA, where we worked on three different houses with Merrimack Valley Habitat for Humanity. Pretty amazing story here too. This Habitat chapter had been working on rehabilitating three adjacent houses, and after a year they were almost done. One of the families had even begun to move furniture into one of them, and none of the units were more than two weeks away from completion when a nightclub under renovation next door caught fire in the middle of the night and burned down almost the entire block. The Habitat houses were completely lost, and they had to start over from scratch.
But they did start over, and even though it's only been 5 or 6 months they've made amazing progress. Then throw 32 young energetic people into the mix and you can get a lot done in an 8-hour Saturday. One group of B&Bers were digging holes and filling them with cement for fenceposts, another group was building and raising a wall:
One of the other trip leaders, Skip, and I were putting up scaffolding with the help of a few other people, and then a few of us were putting up rafters:
(That's me in the last picture.) Anyway, it's been a fantastic start to the trip and I can't wait to get back on the bike tomorrow. Next stop: Fitchburg, MA.
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