Bloomington, IN

So I've been meaning to write about this day for a while but I've been a little busy biking across the country and all so here it is:

With only 37 miles to go, we were able to sleep in to 7:00am, which was incredible after the century the day prior. We were heading into Bloomington, Indiana, home of the Indiana University Hoosiers. It was another scorching day topping out at 90°. The ride itself wasn’t very eventful. We were told during route meeting that the first half was flat, while there were some hills in the second half. We stopped for lunch in Nashville, IN under a beautiful pavilion in the town center. It was a quaint little town with a variety of unique shops lining the streets.

Immediately after lunch the hills started, almost exactly halfway through the ride. They weren’t anywhere as treacherous as the ascents in the mountains, it was just slightly unexpected after only seeing flat land for 20 miles. A few miles from the host the directions started getting a little funky. A lot of us missed the turn onto Morningside Dr. because it was unmarked, but we all made it nonetheless. Indiana University had set us up with an activities room in one of the residence halls on campus. They were nice enough to provide us with towels and gave us access to three apartments within the building so we could shower. The apartments were massive compared to the closet sized dorm rooms that I had in school. 

As I said before, the ride itself was uneventful, but the day was quite the opposite. Indiana University didn’t provide us with a meal so we had to work our Donation Magic. Throughout the evening, we DMed 60 Jimmy John sandwiches and several burritos from the Laughing Planet. Apparently the Laughing Planet is a great little café that has live music throughout the week. Unfortunately we were there on a night with no live music. But the town of Bloomington was amazing, it has a great little downtown with a lot of shops, food, music, and bars.
The most exciting part of Bloomington was by far the rock quarry. We heard from a Bike & Build alum that did CUS ’14 that if we were willing to take a 16 mile detour that we wouldn’t regret it. A lot of us were already back at the hosts and weren’t really sure if we felt like riding another 16 miles, yet we really wanted to go to the quarry. So we put our heads together and took an Uber instead. Chad, the best Uber driver anyone could ask for picked us up at our host and drove us to a dead end road facing into the woods. We confirmed we were in the right spot before we just started wandering through the woods, but after confirming that’s exactly what we did. There was a trail that we followed that led us straight to it. We saw the water and we started giggling like little school children, we were so excited. But upon emerging from the brush, we noticed we were on the side with a 65 foot drop. There were several people already there on the opposite side where the drops were only 25ish feet high. As we were looking over the ledge, of course the locals started to antagonize us trying to get us to jump from the 65 foot ledge. Most of us laughed it off, but there was one that said he wanted to do it… and that he did. He took off his shirt, set his backpack down, looked over the ledge, and within 20 seconds jumped off the ledge. Upon emerging from the water, which felt like an eternity to us bystanders, we all cheered so loud mostly relieved that he was okay. The rest of us were chicken to jump from that high so we instead decided to walk around to the lower shelves. 

There were only 6 of us at first, but then another group Ubered a ride, also from Chad! We spent the next couple of hours swimming and jumping. For several of us, it was the best adventure outside of biking that we had on the trip. After getting back and settling down for the night, we put on the movie ‘Breaking Away’ that was filmed in Bloomington. The opening scene was actually at the same rock quarry that we had gone to, so it was a lot of fun telling everybody that didn’t go, “Oh, Oh, I jumped off of that,” and, “I was there!!!” It was just a great way to end the day. I can’t say anything about the rest of the movie because I fell asleep 30 minutes in, but from what I’ve been told, it’s pretty good. 

Bloomington was a great place and I can’t wait to find more surprises that this country has to offer in the next 3000 miles!

Road Rage and Road Kill

As you can imagine having traveled over 1000 miles on some back country roads, we have passed a few dead animal carcasses. The majority of them have been raccoons, however, I have seem some interesting things. The most surprising has definitely been the amount of turtles. Poor little guys weren't able to get out of the way even if they wanted to (I assume some of them were depressed and they didn't see any other options). The other day I saw a bloated deer, it looked so big and stretched out that if you would poke it, it would pop. So of course I tried to convince my friend Taylor to poke it, but she wasn't having it. I've also seen a ton of squirrels, frogs, birds, and unfortunately a skunk. One skunk in over 1000 miles is pretty good, but its still terrible. Just think of how long you can smell it while riding past it in a car, well try it on your bike. It takes 10 times as long to get out of the smell zone.

As for road rage, not every driver is polite about us being on the road. We've gotten honked at, yelled at, called some colorful things, but my favorite was when we got an empty bottle thrown at us. Yes, that's right, someone through their trash at us! We were just riding along when someone yelled out the window, "Get off the ****ing road," (I'll let you fill in the blanks, I'm trying to keep this blog PG). We were in a line of 4 people. He screamed it at the last person in line, and then as he drove past, when he got to the leader, that is when the bottle came flying at us. Fortunately it didn't hit anybody, it's just frustrating that people are so rude. It's not like we were even in their way, he easily got around. It was really awkward when we passed them again while they were stopped at a stop light, so it's not even like we were holding them up. Oh well, for the amount of cars that pass us each day, I'm thankful for the patience of most people, the fact that I can only remember one real road rage story in 25 days says that the majority of people are understanding.

Build Days

I don't have much to say about the first two build days, they were kind of lame and there wasn't enough work for 30 people. I actually felt bad with the condition we left the first house in. All we had to do was paint the exterior of the house. In the morning it was fine. We were able to put a brush in everyone's hand. However, after lunch there were a lot of people standing around because we didn't have enough ladders to reach the second story. Then we ran out of time to finish the house. Although we did help, because the job wasn't complete, the house appeared to look worse than when we started.

The second build day we poured a foundation. We were able to make an assembly line of wheel barrows and to transport the concrete. There were just a lot more people than necessary, but it was still more fun than painting.

The third build day in Cincinnati was incredible. It was what I wanted to do the whole trip, just hammer in some nails. We teamed up with Habitat for Humanity while they were building 4 houses right next to each other. We were working on 3 of those houses, putting up siding, assembling scaffolding, building stairs, and building a roof. I was on the roof crew with our fearless leader Ken. He was a great guy that really knew what he was doing and was more than willing to explain. He also made sure we were all being safe because "Safety is Sexy!" It took a little while to get started, we had to arrange all of our tools and materials on the scaffolding. I probably climbed the ladder 30 times within an hour, but I was more than willing. Once we got started we were like a well oiled machine. We put up the gutter board and progressed with the sheathing. It was interesting to be on the construction side of things for once. I've structurally designed roofs before but never have I built them. It definitely gives me a new perspective that will make me better at what I do.

I'm really looking forward to the build days ahead.