A month in review

I remember last summer while my friend and I were driving back from Rapid City I saw two cross country cyclists. As I honked to cheer them on I remember thinking how cool it’d be to be able to undertake such an endeavor. The seed was planted.

Now when I look at our route it takes me a while to believe how far we’ve made it. Most of us feel that way. We take the challenge one day at a time, and so it’s difficult to visualize the distance covered on a map.

Where we've gone so far (in green)

But for first time cross country cyclists, I believe we are faring quite well. At an average of approximately 63 miles a day, we have biked almost 1500 miles and made it to 5 states. If all goes well, we expect to be back in Brookings by the end of October.

We've had quite the journey so far. We've biked in 94° and in 28°. When we started, 30 miles was a long day for us and we had to take breaks every 8 miles. Today, we take a break after about 30 miles. We realized how amazing the human body was to adapting to the environment. Once we accepted this, the challenge of waking up every morning to go bike another 60 miles didn't seem too daunting.

What was daunting though was the fundraising aspect of our trip. We soon grasped the fact that after 8 hours of biking, cooking then camping out, fundraising was one of the last things on our mind. We figured we needed to be done biking earlier in the day so we had more time to focus on our cause. We started getting up early (6 am usually) and getting on the road within a couple hours. Some of us who need the morning caffeine burst to get going have more of a motivation to get on the road early.

Morning caffeine burst

With the help of a few of our friends and family members we now have them call churches, newspapers, radio and TV stations of towns we are heading to beforehand to find us fundraising opportunities. Although we haven’t raised as much as we would have liked to so far, we have a lot to be thankful for.

The range of people we have met so far – the filmmaker, the tree doctor, the Americorps, the carpenter to name a few. They all had very different and very exciting stories. But they all shared one ideology in common – giving back.  It still amazes us to see how some people are so comfortable in letting, in a sense, complete strangers into their house, making them a warm meal and offering them a place to stay. We are truly touched and humbled by your generosity. Thank you all for everything you have done.

Riding on!

Tomorrow we hit state 6 – Washington. We made a promise amongst ourselves that only if we raise $5000 by Walla Walla, we'll go to Seattle. For those of you that have been there and from what we hear, it’s one of the most beautiful places in the USA.

Help us pedal to Seattle!