Day 5: Can we take five?

Rest day in Afton, VA

The first four days of this trip have been nothing but hectic. Day 1 had me running a bottle rocket workshop seven times followed by a terrifying time being the driver in DC (how is it worse than Manhattan??). Day 2 had me cycling on gravel roads through a severe thunderstorm all the while Charles was lost to the world. Day 3’s ascent into Shenandoah National Park felt like an insurmountable obstacle with my tired body (I was one of the cheaters :p). Day 4 (my driving day) involved some scary driving through windy roads in the midst of one of the worst downpours I’ve seen in my life. But finally, we made it to a rest day… 
Pam’s off-the-grid house was an absolutely magical place to spend our first rest day. Greta said enough about the awesome person that is Pam Mendosa, but her place was just so awesome that I couldn’t write this blog without mentioning it.

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So, what exactly does a “rest day” entail? Normally on this trip, we crash at someone’s place or a campsite, eat, sleep, then pack our things up the following morning for another day of biking. On a rest day, we instead stay put in one place, both to take a break and also to get pending tasks done. For today there were many items on the agenda.

For one, all of our camping equipment was soaked from the overnight downpour at Big Meadows and needed to be dried. The team did a great job using Pam’s entire property as a place to dry our stuff.

Ramona and I spent some time in the morning perfecting our bike cleaning technique and left everyone’s bikes looking squeaky clean.

There were three more tasks that required venturing from Pam’s isolated intentional community to Charlottesville, the location of the University of Virginia and also where Ishaq grew up! Four of us (Me, Ramona, Sarah, and Charles) drove to this lovely town and I dropped Sarah and Charles off at a laundromat (Pam didn’t have a dryer).

Ramona and I went to a bike shop called Blue Wheel Bicycles to fix my broken spokes (just like me fr). After we dropped off my bike, we went to Whole Foods to return some unused fenders (the team decided they were actually fine getting wet from their tires). I called Sarah and seeing that laundry was going to take a while, went to Great Outdoor Provision co. to get myself some packing cubes (my disorganized duffel bag was driving me crazy). We may have also had some fun looking at all of the gear.

Once laundry work finished up we all decided to hit up Shenandoah Joe Coffee Roasters for a work sesh on our laptops (Pam’s house unfortunately had no wifi or cell service). Ishaq spent the night at his own house and joined up with us at the cafe. After a few hours of semi-productive time and a very good fruit smoothie, we headed on back to Pam’s place and enjoyed another relaxing evening arguing over our route for the following day… 

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Side tangent, the route for the following day was looking to be short, but very difficult, with an over 3000ft climb and some of the steepest grades that we would see for the entire trip. We argued over a couple of potential routes for hours… I’ve been the main route planner for this trip and spending my valuable evening hours making these routes every day is going to drive me crazyyy