This Is It.

The real thing.

leaving tomorrow morning at 9 am. driving to VA beach. getting on a bike for the next 2.5 months and biking like a fiend.

I played Apples-to-Apples tonight and the only word that i won was courageous. so - I guess that's kind of fitting. biking more than I ever thought I would bike - ever - and building houses for people that i don't know with other people that I've never met, and volunteering all of the time and money for it. yeah. pretty wild.

and it should be a long time to think. without much to do but push my body to keep going and let my mind wander. hopefully to good places. i'm bringing a sketch book, and journal, and going to try to post here whenever I can - and upload pics to picasa if we ever get high-speed on a day off, or some such. I'm not sure how well that will work out - but the blogging should be fine since I have a bluetooth keyboard to hook up to any computer. :)

bienvenido! to me!

Last Dart.

Mouth.

okay. last day at Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH. finally. I love Hanover, but it's a 2 hour drive (stop for gas in there necessarily) each way for usually 2-4 hours tutoring. so, I work less than half the total time I'm away from the apt. kinda ridiculous. and if it weren't for the fact that I care about the students actually getting tutored (because no-one else could take on the extra tutees) I would prolly have just said f-that and NOT had to drive at least once a week across state lines.

but it gives me a good reason to say that I'm not biking today (unless I go out at night) - bad though that might be - I can't really see making an intense thrust this late in the game really paying off all that much. I don't have any problem going 20+ miles (besides the sunburn ... ouch) and I can't see 50 being that horrendous (especially since we'll prolly have to go slowly and be with the main group the first few days). and my bike is decked out. like - 4 water bottle cages decked out. like camera holster, gps, cadence, HR, seat pack, frame pack, blinky things and reflector things, and pumps - oh yeah. I look pro.

I had a bus full of little kids wave and yell out the window at me the other day when I was in full regalia. I gave them a huge thumbs up - and they went crazy. screaming, yelling, throwing hands outside the windows (now kids, that's against the rules). it was awesome. and then within about 200 yards I ran over a tiny speck of glass and punctured my tube. luckily the kids were passed by then, and lucky I had all my fixit stuff with me, and I thought that I had patched it well enough ... but the sad puddle of tire yesterday (three days later) attests to something not being quite right. I really just want to use the vulcanizing solution - because it says vulcanizing - and redo the whole thing. otherwise why bring an already punctured tube on the trip??

okay. gotta shower. rental arrives soon.

4 Days.

Yeah.

and then I drive down to VA with my newly anointed cousin and her schoolmate - to bike across the continental US. hot damn. this is going to be amazing. I just got the Cliff Bars in the mail - and I now am in possession of 15 boxes of 100 sample bars, in chocolate mint and banana nut. yeah. 15 boxes. of 100. over 120 pounds of cliff bars. thank you again to Cliff Bars for their huge donation and generosity!!!

I've also been trying to think of good games to bring for the group that you won't get sick of before the end ... basically I'm thinking cards and trying to figure out what else doesn't need a board, can pack easily, and won't get totally destroyed by 30 people over the course of two months.

yeah.

that's what I thought. cards. but keep thinking for me.
can't have a lot of little pieces, scrabble is totally out, and anything with only a few cards or trivia points will probably get memorized by the end. and if you say charades - that's totally not helpful. :)

Man Babies. Photoshop at its best.

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