Day 24 – Moline, IL to Marengo, IA

June 23^th:

I won’t write much about this day because I was just in the host van with Sarah L., which means we were responsible for getting lunch donated for the team.  Joining us were Sam, Rhani, and Jen, who were all sitting out this day for various reasons, including injuries, illnesses, bike problems, or other personal reasons.  On Bike & Build, it wasn’t really required that you ask for food donations, so only those that felt comfortable asking did so.  Honestly, it gives me anxiety to ask for food donations.  I think it’s the fact that I’m asking for a LOT of food for FREE from someone I’ve never met before, and to whom I’ll likely never return the favor… when will I ever be in Iowa again??  Many restaurants and grocery stores are willing to donate at least a little something, and the worst that they can say is no.  Or, as we found out, they can argue with you and question everything about what you’re doing in a way that puts you on the defensive very quickly.  We went to a grocery store and the manager asked us so many questions in an argumentative manner, and then didn’t even give us time to fully answer without moving on to the next accusatory question.  We only managed to get 30 bananas out of this encounter, so things weren’t looking great.  The team had a 100 mile day and I was doubtful that they would be satisfied with one banana each for lunch.  We went to a Caribou Coffee and the manager gave us bagged frozen sandwiches and bagels.  My initial thought was “well, we can’t turn this down, but we certainly can’t feed our team frozen food…” BUT it ended up saving us because we took all these frozen sandwiches and set them out on the dashboard of the van to let them thaw out for about two hours before we actually got to the lunch stop.  Desperate times, my friends (I’ve been saying “desperate times” SO MUCH on this trip!! — just as an aside).

We ended up with a hodge podge of foods, and we were initially worried that we hadn’t gotten enough.  However, it was apparent that we actually hadn’t done too poorly when we finally laid out all the food on the park tables and it was on display.  Our teammates told us that we had done a great job, so that was a relief to all of us in the van.

I don’t think I took a single photo this day.  Being in the van is stressful, y’all.  Knowing that I have to acquire a substantial amount of food for 30 riders by lunch time when most restaurants that serve lunch don’t open til 11 (which is too late) is STRESSFUL.  I don’t enjoy it.  GET ME BACK ON THE BIKE.

OH WAIT here we go… okay this is from yesterday.  I went to a bar in Moline with Kendra, Brett, and Kevin yesterday evening.  We went to watch the last part of the U.S. women’s soccer game and they beat Columbia, although admittedly, they looked pretty terrible in the little bit of the game that I was able to watch.  This was after our extremely rainy and stormy day where we were only able to ride 35 miles because of the torrential downpours and awful winds.  But check out these clouds!  They were super weird.  It’s hard to explain what it looked like outside — it was eerily orange at around 9pm.  By orange I mean that when I looked out the window of the bar, I thought the windows were tinted orange/yellowish.  But they were not, and it was so strange!  Then there were these bubbly clouds and even the locals ran out of the bar to come check these out:

Okay, that’s all I’ve got for ya.  Van days are lame.

Day 23 – Freeport, IL to Moline, IL

June 22^th:

It was scheduled to be a long 90 mile day of rolling hills through fields of corn (as per usual, these days), but we heard that bad weather was on its way.  A consequence of being one of the first people ready in the morning with my duffle bag packed is that it ends up at the bottom and back of the van, where it becomes irretrievable once everyone else packs their bags and then someone finally checks the radar to see that it’s going to pour all day.  So my rain jacket tends to get left behind.  Anyway, we got ready super quickly (for us) and were out by 6:15.  We made it to the first water stop and noticed that it was still kind of dark outside despite the fact that we’d been riding for a couple of hours and it should be getting significantly lighter.  We checked the radar and saw that if we were just about anywhere else in the U.S., we’d be in the clear from the rain.  Of course, the huge storms were happening where we are, and basically only where we are:

We’ve been rained on SO MUCH.  I don’t remember getting rained on THIS much on Bike & Build.  We’ve been unable to complete several miles now due to bad weather conditions.  We were able to ride about 35 miles before we decided we needed to stop at a gas station to let the storm pass.  A woman even passed by us in her car as we were climbing up a hill and she told us that a storm with “gale force winds” was on its way.

When we got to the gas station, we were thankful that it was more of a small town gas station, and by that I mean there was a Subway inside and some booths to sit in.  We decided we were going to be camping out here for a bit, especially after checking the radar and realizing that the storm was going to last for much of the day.

The gas station was Wizard of Oz themed… or something… we weren’t totally sure…

At 10am, the sky looked like this as it poured rain with heavy winds:

We met a group of four old men who seemed like they’d been coming to this gas station/restaurant for years.  They joked around with us and we were chummy with them.  We entertained them (how often does this small town see 30 cyclists passing through?) and they surely entertained us.

Patrick took a photo of us at the gas station, and I don’t think he realized I was looking at the camera and making this face until after he took the photo:

I kinda looked like Rachel Dratch’s character for like one episode of 30 Rock (I don’t even really remember anything about this character, but I still reminded myself of her in the previous photo):

So we made the best of our 6 hour stay there.  Well, some of us stayed 6 hours, anyway.  I chose to hang back because when we decided to start shuttling, our van had to go back and forth between the church and the gas station because, again, we can’t fit 30 people with all our bikes and gear in two vans.  We patiently waited and just hung out at the gas station.  The staff were so kind to us, and even offered us free donuts at one point!  Before we left, we took a photo outside of the gas station with the remaining “long term stay” crew:

We finally got picked up by the van, but it was still nearly an hour and a half drive to the church in Moline, IL.  Sean and I were feeling slap happy.  When Matt fell asleep, we put a donut in his mouth because he sleeps like this when he falls asleep:

Even the chummy old men at the gas station said “oh man, that guy’s asking to be messed with” when they saw Matt sleeping like that.

Our Team Portland phrase/logo or whatever you want to call it is “Find a way.”  I took a photo of Sean trying desperately to find a comfortable position to sleep in the van, and then posted it to the GroupMe with the caption “find a way.”

Overall, I hate missing riding days.  AND I’m in the host van tomorrow.  AGH.  At least I can say I biked EVERY SINGLE INCH of the country on Bike & Build.  I hate that I can’t say the same for the 4K, but part of the fun in such an adventure is what you make of it when things go wrong!  One last photo of Julia and I being goofy:

Day 22 – DeKalb, IL to Freeport, IL

June 21^th:

Happy Father’s Day!  I dedicated my ride day to my dad, who is one of my biggest supporters.  He talks me up to everyone he knows and makes me seem way more awesome than I am.  When I said I was doing this trip again, I got nothing but support and encouragement from him.  Growing up, my brother Kevin and I would witness him helping random people we encountered who needed a hand, whether it be opening the door for someone who has their hands full or pulling over to help someone with car trouble.  We often looked at each other and rolled our eyes, not in an annoyed way but rather to acknowledge what we were both thinking – that our dad was consistently willing to go out of his way for others and could never walk away from someone that he saw was in need of help.  I was happy to ride for him on Father’s Day.

Many of us dedicated our ride days to our fathers, and many of us chose to also dedicate this day to our teammate Brett and his family.  Brett’s father passed away from cancer when he was 7, and left a family of four children behind.  We were happy to ride for him and support our teammate on this day which is always hard for him.

We started out riding through the town of DeKalb:

Before we knew it, we were out riding alongside the cornfields again.  We took some photos at the beginning of the day, including one where Kyle and Kendra acted like they were throwing me into a pond.

  

We took some photos as we rode 5 wide on a quiet and lonely road.

We rode on SO MUCH GRAVEL today.  It was unreal.  I think my arms will be sorer than my legs because of gripping so hard and having my arms vibrate on the rattling handlebars for much of the day.  We took a break and used this time as a photo opp near the cornfield.  We’re really starting to run out of photo ideas.

Near the second water stop of the day, we saw a river sort of by the road.  You had to squint through the trees to see it, but it was there and we were dying to get in.  We pulled off to see if we could find an access point and a good stop for the water stop, but we couldn’t find one.  We found a nice home with a huge barn and some horses in the yard.

The family recommended that we don’t get in the river, but told us we were free to park in their big driveway and use their pool in the backyard!!  We were obviously sold on this idea.  They were so kind and generous to us, letting us use their bathroom and providing towels for us when we got out of the pool.  It was unbelievably refreshing.

The host van had gotten Chipotle for lunch, but we had been waiting a while at this house and we didn’t want to overstay our welcome.  We decided to bike 10 more miles before the lunch stop.  We all got back on our bikes, climbed some unexpected hills in Illinois (so much for it being flat everywhere) and eventually got to the lunch spot about 25 miles out from the host.

At the beginning of the day, I had posted the photo where I had “DAD” written on my calf to Facebook.  My pharmacy school friend, or rather my “pharm phriend,” Erin Brannick, saw that we were riding to Freeport, IL and mentioned that it was her hometown!  We didn’t have showers arranged there, and since we were still working on getting them set up, I asked her if she had any connections.  She hooked us up with showers at her old high school!  THANK YOU SO MUCH, ERIN!  I owe you a drink when we’re out in Chapel Hill at the beginning of the PY2 year!

Day 21 – Chicago, IL to DeKalb, IL

June 20^th:

Wake-up time was a “sleep-in” time of 6am.  It was a shorter day of 67 miles to DeKalb, IL.  It’s impressive how much better we’ve all gotten at this cycling thing.  We used to have to form riding groups based on some level of ability, including one known-to-be slow individual per group (it’s not meant to be an insult; everyone just has different experience and abilities, and we all started out at different speeds).  Now, we’re able to just totally randomize the group and we all ride at about the same pace.  It’s great!!

I was initially with a smaller group of Jen, Zach, and Sarah L.  We rode west which took us away from the city, so we never actually rode in the heart of Chicago on a ride day.  The beginning of the day was frustrating because the route took us on roads where there was a four way stop at every intersection in the neighborhood.  We often took these stop signs as a yield rather than an actual stop.  If we’d stopped, it would have taken forever to get where we were going.  We went through some cool neighborhoods just outside of the city and it was awesome to see how the neighborhoods were walkable and bike-able.  We got on a greenway for a while that wasn’t ideal, as it crossed many roads which meant we had to play the yielding game again at each of these intersections.  We got onto an unpaved path later in the morning (these seem to be a favorite on the 4K — not really for the riders, but for the staff who created the routes prior to the beginning of the trip) and were reminded that it was, indeed, a Saturday morning when we found they were more crowded than expected.

 

We got lost for a bit because the trail ended and we couldn’t figure out how to get back on track with our queue sheet.  We stopped for a while on the greenway to figure it out, and even though we were just standing around, Kyle managed to fall.  If you stand around for too long with just one foot clipped in, you sometimes lean toward that clipped in foot and then can’t slip out in time to keep yourself from falling.  That’s what happened here.  It was a slow, dramatic fall.

A little bit after the first water stop, Jen got into the van.  She’s been sick and had a fever so she thought it would be best to sleep instead of ride.  I haven’t ridden with her for a full day yet, so I was sad to see her go, but riding with 3 people was fast and it was easier to maintain a quick pace.  We booked it to the lunch stop unintentionally (we were just cruising!) and waited for the rest of our team to arrive.  The host crew had scored big time on lunch, and Martha had a photo on the GroupMe of her with the food from Trader Joe’s:

Much of the remainder of the ride was on this unpaved trail.  We passed much of the time by playing our favorite game of contact, which was fun even with just 3 players.

We found a wheat field and although I know there will be many between here and the west, I wanted to take a photo with my bike in the field, which looks like a golden sea when the wind glides through.  Zach did too!

 

 

 

It started to drizzle a little bit, so we thought we should keep moving.  We stayed at a cute little church in DeKalb that was actually called The Church in DeKalb, which is confusing because there are many churches in this town.  The pastor and the church members were cool and actually a little bit hipster, which was refreshing for some reason.  They even gave us a list of restaurants and bars in the area, as well as the contact information for the local bike shop down the road.

My Bike & Build teammate, Lo, whom I’d met up with when we stayed in Champaign, was visiting friends in DeKalb this weekend.  Her and her friend Bonnie came to pick me up and take me out for dinner and drinks!  They both attended grad school in DeKalb at Northern Illinois University, so they took me to one of their favorite places.  It was great to see Lo one more time before she goes to Africa for 17 months beginning in the fall.  I don’t get to see her often, but she is easily one of my best friends from B&B and I’m sad that she’ll be even further away for such a long time, but I’m proud of her for what she’s doing.  Bike & Builders are never satisfied with a mediocre lifestyle, and she is going after the life she wants.  As we used to say in a complementary fashion on B&B, “youz a baaaad bitch,” Lo!

When I returned, over half of the team was sleeping, which is exactly what I want to see when I’m ready to pass out myself.  Hannah had posted a photo to the GroupMe of Patrick (aka Catrick) that said “Keep your enemies close but your diaper rash cream closer.”

My parents also sent me photos of the dogs on these carts that you can attach to bikes when you take things to the beach.  Beach bike carts?  I don’t even know.  I don’t think they’re meant to carry dogs, but how cute are Ellie & Nora?

 

Day 20 – Scholarship day in Chicago, IL

June 19^th:

I woke up at the decent time of about 8:00am, and it was truly wonderful.  I got a great night of sleep and was ready for a fun day in Chicago.  Shortly after I’d woken up, I was picked up by my Bike & Build trip leader, Erin (aka “Motherbird”), who lives just north of the city.  She is one of the greatest people I’ve ever had the privilege of knowing.  She treated me to a breakfast at Milk & Honey, a local restaurant close to UIC.  Our time together was short, but I thoroughly enjoyed getting to spend time catching up with someone I admire and whose empowering friendship I cherish.  I told her about the trip and explained some of the differences between 4K and B&B.  We reminisced on our Bike & Build life and talked about what a blast a bike trip reunion would be with our NC2SD’13 team.  I love you, Erin!  I’m so thankful for you and I miss you already!!   I’m really upset that I forgot to take a picture with her, but here’s a photo of her at the beach in San Diego at the end of our B&B adventure:

When I returned around 11am, I found Sean outside cleaning his bike.  We’d ridden through lots of rain and mud the past few days, and it reminded me that I should really take the time to clean my bike as well.  We have to make our extra body parts for the summer last for 70 days!  I grabbed my bike and spent about an hour cleaning and lubing my bike.

So in a previous blog, I mentioned that I didn’t like biking in cities.  Initially, it scared me to ride alongside so many cars, but I discovered this was because it’s much harder to ride in a group in a city than it is to ride solo.  Strangely enough, on this designated day off the saddle, I felt like going for a bike ride alone.  You don’t get much alone time on this trip, so if you find time to be on your own, you take it!  I biked all around Chicago and came to the conclusion that I LOVE THIS CITY!!!!!  It’s so cool!  If it weren’t freezing cold for the majority of the year, I would totally live here, at least for a little while!  It’s more bike friendly than I realized and I had so much fun just riding around and people watching.  Here’s all the photos I took:

The Bean!!! …

I went to the Navy Pier where they have some shops, restaurants, and a Ferris Wheel.  I was by myself and I didn’t have a bike lock, so I asked if I could take my bike on the Ferris Wheel with me.  The answer, sadly, was no.

There are some lanes and stop lights that are specifically for cyclists!

I felt like such a badass biking through the streets of Chicago.  It’s a huge city and I’m rarely comfortable even driving in a city.  I watched other cyclists bike around the city and took some lessons for them.  Many of the rules of the road that apply to riders on less busy roads are better off broken in the city.  For example, I would slide between the parked cars on the side of the road and past the cars in the lane that were stopped at a light so I could make it to the front of the pack and be visible to everyone.  Normally, you should wait behind the last car in this pack and act like a car yourself, but in the city it was different.  I safely ran some red lights (I know it doesn’t sound safe, but trust me I was!) and was an aggressive cyclist.  I cannot emphasize how much fun I had!!!!!!

I eventually biked back to UIC because we had a scholarship presentation at 5:30 at Buckingham Fountain for a recipient named Liesl.  I biked on my own to the fountain because, again, it’s easier to ride in a city alone.  Also, I was excited and proud that I knew how to get there on my own.  Shortly after I arrived, a flood of royal 4K for Cancer shirts surrounded me and I was back with my 4K family.  We met Liesl and her boyfriend and took incredible photos in front of the fountain with the city skyline in the background.

After the scholarship presentation, a few of my teammates and I decided to go get stickers from a nearby gift shop to put on our bikes (WE LOVE STICKERS!).  Most of my teammates had biked there since it was about 2 miles from where we were staying at UIC, so we decided to bike to the shop downtown together.  Flora was in my group, and before we left the fountain, she somehow got a flat.  We laughed about how she got a flat on a day that wasn’t even a ride day, and then we employed the “pump and run” method because no one had a spare tube.  Jo’s just laughing behind us as I pump up Flora’s tire.

My bike is starting to get covered in stickers!!

I’m a little sad that I didn’t get to go to the top of the Sears Tower or dip my feet in at the beach on Lake Michigan.  I kept missing the groups that were going to the Sears Tower, and I thought our route was taking us by the beach the next day, but we ended up going the other direction.  These attractions are reasons for me to come back and visit, though!

Today, our teammate Holly decided to leave the trip and fly home.  She left for personal reasons, but I want to mention it because I know it was a big decision for her to make, and now our team is down to 29 people.  She’ll always be part of our Team Portland family, and we were all sad to see her go!  We’ll miss you, Holly!

Day 19 – Bradley, IL to Chicago, IL

June 18^th:

SO EXCITED FOR CHICAGOOOOO!!!  Not so excited to bike in, though.  I don’t really like biking in a city.  It’s stressful, there’s a lot of cars, and there’s a lot of fast communicating to be done between teammates so that everyone is safe.  We were riding more specifically to University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), which is not quite in the city but right outside of it.  Everyone decided that even though it was a short day of about 64 miles, we wanted to get up as early as we would for a longer day so that we could get to Chicago sooner.  I don’t think I took a single picture going into town because I was feeling extra “hosty” (the term we made up that means YOU JUST WANNA GET THERE ASAP).  We probably got in around 1:00 or 2:00.  We had beds again, so that was exciting! And this was the view from my dorm room:

I wanted to mention that we biked through the south side of Chicago, a place known for some of the highest crime rates in the country.  I realize that this is something to potentially be worried about, but we got so many friendly honks and waves that I felt a sense of community there.  This is home for many people, and a lot of the crime rates are due to gang violence rather than just random violence.  I’m not saying I want to live there, but I enjoyed being cheered on by so many in a place where this was the last thing we expected.  One sweet lady hung out her passenger window as she rode by, chanting “Si se puede!” which means “yes you can!” in Spanish.  It made my day!

When we got there, we settled in, took naps, and relaxed for a bit.  Some people split off and went to the Sears Tower, and some of us (myself included) went to a brewery called Mad House Brewery that was right around the corner from UIC.  My Bike & Build teammate, Max, met up with us after he got off work!

I told Max that Hannah had turned 21 a few days ago.  Since Max is so awesome, he bought her a tequila shot… as well as one for himself, me, and Kevin.  We took a shot together, and as many of you know, I have little to no tolerance, so I was good to go after that.  Martha commented “tequila shots??? What are you, girls on spring break??”

We had a great dinner provided by Martha’s parents, who live in the area, alongside Team Seattle, who we again crossed paths with in Chicago.  We tried to have a late night where we go out on the town and have a good time, but we’ve been finding that we’re SO TIRED by 11pm that nothing really happens.  Some might call us wimps.  But sleep is CRUCIAL and when you have a bed calling your name, it’s hard to get excited about going out and partying.  Plus, we had a whole day ahead of us to explore the city, and I wanted to be fully rested!

Day 18 – Champaign, IL to Bradley, IL

June 17^th:

So it’s great that we’ve been staying in university dorms, but it also means that it takes us exponentially longer in the morning to get ready.  This is because we have to take elevators up and down with our bags, bikes, food, and all the other gear.  It just takes a while to transport everything.  We woke up around 4:30 because we had a 90+ mile day that was bound to actually be over 100 miles, since we get lost so often.  I was on a team with Emma, Martha, Zach, and Gino.  Since the girls in the group wanted to get coffee, we made a quick detour to grab that on the way.

Unfortunately, my coffee did not hold well in my bottle cage and it popped out as we unexpectedly rode over a cobblestone street – what a tragedy.

We somehow got lost during the first part of the day.  Like I’ve said, the roads we’ve been riding on are out in the middle of the farmland and they form a grid.  Roads travel north and south or east and west through the fields.  We’ve learned that each block is one mile long, so we usually know how far we’ve gone, unless there just happens to be long stretches without intersecting roads.  We rode right past some chalk on the ground, which had been covered after a farmer apparently mowed some of the grass near the road and the cut grass covered the chalk.  It wouldn’t be a day on the 4K if someone didn’t get lost!

By the time we made it to the first water stop at about 20 miles, it looked like rain was inevitable.  It had already been sprinkling on us, but now it was getting heavier and more consistent.  We rode in extremely rainy conditions for most of the day.  This photo sums it up:

Gino and I had a collision as we were coming out of the parking lot of a church where we’d had our second water stop.  I decided to stop and fix something about my jacket before we got on the road, and I didn’t make any significant motions to say I was stopping.  He ran right into me.  We both hit the ground pretty hard.  It was still funny enough to take a “crash chat” though, and of course it was sent to the GroupMe.

The rest of the day was just a super rainy ride.  We had to make our own fun of it.  Honestly though, once you’re soaked, you’re soaked.  It comes to a point where it doesn’t even matter that it’s raining anymore because you’re as drenched as you can get anyway.  When the rain let up, a lot of the corn fields and ditches were flooded.  Martha and Zach played “what are the odds” and when Martha asked Zach “What are the odds you’ll lay down in that flooded ditch?” he said “1 in 2” which means that if they guessed the SAME number, Zach had to get in, but if they guessed different numbers, then Martha had to get in.  Martha lost.

Martha decided for personal health reasons to not wear the chamois that she had worn in the bacteria-ridden ditch water during the rest of the ride.  She instead wore regular, not padded athletic shorts, making it look like we had picked up a random not-so-serious rider from the back country roads of Illinois.

When we got to Bradley, IL at the host, Brett and I knew we both needed to go to a bike ship.  We found a local shop called Tern of the Wheel and they helped us fix our bike issues.  Mine suffered a bent derailleur when Gino and I had a collision.  There were three dogs in the bike shop that I got to spend some quality time with while waiting for Brett’s bike to be worked on.  He even gave us some stickers to put on our bike.  One of them said “53 mpb – fifty three miles per burrito” and the other was yellow and said “$0.00 9/10,” which is meant to say I don’t pay for gas with my bike.  I was excited to have two new additions to my bicycle that only Brett and I would have, because so far our team keeps getting the same stickers and applying them to our bikes.