A first attempt to catch up

Wow, I have been a terrible blogger. I log in to blogger for the first time in weeks and the title of my most recent post, "one state down..." is a jarring reminder of how badly I have been keeping up with this. We are now in our eighth state since that last post. New York, New Jersey (for about 10 miles), Pennsylvania (and its three separate mountain ranges), West Virginia (for under 10 miles), Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois have rolled away under our tires. Yesterday we crossed the mighty Mississippi into St. Louis, the "gateway to the west."

The road here has been long, and it has been short. It feels at once as though we've been on this journey together for months, and as though we've just begun. It's very hard to believe that we've gone about a third of the distance from Boston to Santa Barbara, and that the days will soon tick down to the halfway marker.

Anyway, there are many stories to tell and very little internet time to tell them in. After a short swing through New York and an even shorter swing through New Jersey, we entered Pennsylvania: I somehow lost some pictures so this is from someone else's camera, and I couldn't find anyone else who had a copy of the picture of us turning around so that New Jersey would be in the background and spelling out NJ. Alas. New Jersey doesn't really count anyway.

Our first destination in PA was Mt. Pocono. Stop and think about that for a second.

Yes, our destination was the top of a mountain. I don't have the elevation graph from the cue sheet on hand to show you, but it was relatively flat for the most of the day before curving upward exponentially--not exaggerating--in the last 10 miles. The last 3 miles in particular were a single unrelenting ascent, which was slow and laborious but punctuated by inspirational chalk messages on the road from the riders that the front of the pack and a poster taped to a speed limit sign by one rider's unexpectedly visiting girlfriend that read "Almost there Bike & Build!" And waiting on the church lawn at the top of the hill were my parents, who were almost as excited to see me as Arlo, our puppy. After a nice dinner with the folks at the only restaurant in town I headed back to the church and they headed back to Ithaca.

The next morning we set off for Berwick, PA, famous for a nuclear power plant, a Wise potato chip factory and a ridiculously good high school football team. That evening we were featured on the local news, supposedly including part of an interview with me, but I still haven't seen it. I also got another visit, this time from Billy, a friend from Providence who has since moved back home to eastern PA. The next morning we rolled out of town with the steam from the nuclear power plant silhouetted in the sunrise.


The day out of Berwick was our first century: our first 100 mile day. For me it was also the day that everything started going wrong...