day 42: adiós, amy! 🚗

Denver, CO to Denver, CO — 0 mi, 0 ft

greetings from the mile high city (and home of the beloved broncos¹)! 🐎 this is sarah, back with my 2nd learning festival blog!

while i like to give myself plenty of time to get ready in the morning on biking days, learning festival days have turned out to be quite the opposite. i woke up about 20 minutes before our planned departure time, quickly threw on my usual spokes t-shirt and black jeans, and headed downstairs to grab a quick breakfast. thankfully, ishaq was taking care of that: he was behind the stove cooking up some lovely banana pancakes! 🍌 i had mine with some jam, but sadly forgot to take any pictures :((

eventually, the 8 of us cram into our 7 passenger mini van (shhh…), and i take one for the team and sit in the non-existent seat in the middle row. we queued up a range of music to hype us up for teaching—from kanye to disney—and after weaving our way through city traffic, eventually made it to kipp sunshine peak academy, who is hosting kids from the boys and girls club of denver!

per usual, we start to arrange ourselves into various classrooms and begin setting-up our workshops. while originally in one classroom, joseph and i accidentally break the leg off of a table, and one of the staff move us somewhere else. whoops 😬 (to be fair, the building had sadly recently been caught in a pretty bad flood, which i’m guessing soaked up the wooden tables and made them pretty susceptible to damage). after everyone is settled, we make our way to the cafeteria to introduce ourselves, arrange the kids into groups (usually based on age, if possible), and lead everyone to their first “station.” 

for some reason, no matter how many learning festivals i do, i’m always nervous right before starting the day—it’s probably my life-long fear of public speaking. but, like always, i got into my groove, and things went pretty smooth from there! even if the kids are not super interested in the complex physics and chemistry behind real-life rockets and chemical reactions, seeing the their excitement when we finally go outside and launch them is SO much fun for everyone involved—college kids included (these things go seriously high, i’m talking dozens of feet above roof tops at LEAST!!!) for our 2nd out of 4 groups, we ran into a unique and unexpected situation: not only were they the youngest of our groups (ages 5-7, i believe), a majority of them spoke spanish as their first language. while i took spanish in high school, speaking was not emphasized nearly as much as it should have been (which is odd, since in my opinion, that’s the most important part…): i could catch a few words, but would be too slow in formulating a response (if i could at all—99% of the time i would be too nervous to speak anyway since it would be pretty clear that i do NOT speak spanish at a decent level). thankfully, besides the other teacher who was there helping translate a bit, i managed to snag a native spanish speaker for my learning festival partner—joseph was definitely MVP for this learning festival 🏅

for lunch, we were provided jimmy john’s sandwiches, chips, and oj! 🥪 i also took a cinnamon toast crunch bar cereal bar that was of questionable origin: i thought it was the kind that was mostly the sugary cereal with sweet icing drizzled on top and DEFINITELY not good for you, but it ended up mostly being oats with the rare CTC nibble. not worth it 😔 we got through our last 2 groups, and with a little drizzle of rain at the end, finished up our 7th of 10 learning festivals. joseph and i cleaned up the field, carried our materials inside, and took some time to decompress from the day while the others cleaned up their own workshops (MAJOR props to teachers who do this 7 hours a day…180 days a year…) he worked on figuring out some of our routes for the next few days in the rockies, and i texted some people back while giving my occasional input on some of his…questionable course choices (i am a notable member of team anti-loose dirt/sand/rough gravel). i hear rumors of video games in another room (sadly there are only 2 controllers), but eventually we finish packing up the car and leave—this time, i am in shot gun 😎

we came back home to a lovely taco dinner prepped and ready by our lovely hosts—MIT alumni david and maud! it was planned in advance to also be a denver area MIT alumni event, so once the spokies had had a bit of time to relax, alumni started wandering in, food was served, and conversations began. i decided to float around to make the most of this unique experience—suprisingly, this is only the 2nd time on spokes that we’ve interacted with other MIT folks! some notable characters included:

• a fellow course 7 (biology) alum, who never used his degree except in one instance where he managed a project involving chemistry modeling software 🧪
• his wife, who was an alum of “that other school down the river” (a.k.a. harvard): we had a lovely conversation about everything spokes, as well as northern nevada! she had traveled through there when moving from the bay area to colorado
• a guy who went to the tour de france and shook lance armstrong’s hand! i think he was also the same guy who was also a member of the track and field team like me! he was mostly a sprinter, but was also occasionally thrown in as a long jumper. we bonded over the struggles of head winds in jumping events 🫠
• li (who was there the day before when we arrived), and his daughter! i got to hear about an epic, 15-month long road trip across america he went on a few years ago! he also gave me some recommendations for other sights to see in the southwest—specifically arizona and new mexico ☀️

to be honest, i always forget that we are all MIT students, not just a random group of college-age kids. talking with the other spokies and alumni about dorms, courses, athletics, and so on really reminded me of that connection. it’s always interesting to get to chat with alumni, too—to see how the spirit of MIT has persisted across generations. even though so much has changed throughout the years, one thing always stays the same—the passion. i think that’s one of my favorite things about MIT: no matter our interests, whether they be in STEM, the humanities, arts, sports…our passions are never taken lightly, and that’s what takes us far. it also makes the people (my actual favorite part) so fun and exciting to interact with and learn from! 💗

eventually, the alumni make their way home, and the spokies start winding down to prepare for a LONG day of climbing ahead. but first, for those of you keeping up with the van recall drama…charles received a call from enterprise during our learning festival earlier in the day with the news that they had FINALLY found a replacement car for us!!! 🥳 so after a collective effort to fully unpack the van, we bid goodbye to charles, greta, and amy as they made their way to the denver airport to switch out for what ended up being the exact same car, except it was silver and a hybrid! her name is TBD…amy jr. was brought up, but i personally veto that—not creative enough. joseph and ishaq made the last minute decision to go watch superman (a 2 HOUR MOVIE) at 10:30pm—i declined their gracious invitation, as i wanted to get some decent sleep before (as previously stated) our LONGGG day of climbing ahead. 

i went to sleep feeling grateful for the opportunity to (due to car switching that night and repacking in the morning) slightly sleep-in to a calm 8am, at that day’s driver (greta’s) discretion. the day ahead had in-store for us a lovely (awful) 5,000 feet of climbing over 50 miles…i was very nervous, but had resolved that i was going to take it slow and steady—as SLOW as i needed. this would be my first big climb since shenandoah on day 2, which i hadn’t fully done due to cooking myself the day before (because of my lack of knowledge of my lower set of gears…i will never live that down), and concerns for my breathing. what i think i lack for in physicality, though, i make up plenty in what my dad likes to call “mental toughness”—i may be the last to finish, but i will FINISH (which, spoiler alert: i DID!!!)

with that, i leave you to read on ahead about beginning our epic trek through the rockies! see you next time as we cross the border from colorado to utah! 🏜️

1. beloved by my long-time family friends, the arons! if you’re reading this, thanks for all the lovely comments! colorado has been AMAZING!!! ↩︎