Day 14: Where do we go from here?

My eyelids peel slowly open. 

I hear a high-pitched voice coming from the door. I sit up in my bed and check the time– It reads 7:43am

Is she out of her mind??

Recently, Tatiana has self assigned herself the task of waking up the whole team. Last night, the team agreed to wake up at 7:45 am. It’s not often you sleep on a real bed during spokes, and I was determined to make use of every second of sleep allocated to me while being able to enjoy such a luxury.

The door creeks open. 

Tatiana is greeted by a haunting sight- the nastiest side eyes Nate and I could brandish

Her face, previously having portrayed a sense of optimism only a so-called “morning person” could, is visibly overtaken by fear.

She apologizes and closes the door.

As she turns away, I spot her phone in hand, wretched “wakeup music”- as she calls it- one play button away from ruining my morning.

It never did play, as it usually does, and I managed to sleep later than I have all summer- till 8:20 am. 

Hindsight is always 20/20, and so I do appreciate Tatiana for taking on a job so dangerous, it gives even the most elite warfighters nightmares– waking up a team of grumpy, sleep-deprived cyclists.

Today, we taught at the Challenger Learning Center in Hazard, Kentucky. It was a great day of teaching, and I am especially grateful to the center’s assistant director, Charles, for, well, a lot of things,

• Driving 4 hours to help us transport team members after “the incident” (read Carmen’s Day 13 Blog)
• Coordinating a very structured learning festival and allowing us to reach incredibly talented kids in the region.
• Providing us with meals and a fantastic place to sleep.
• Being incredibly friendly and passionate about creating STEM opportunities for kids in rural Kentucky.

… to name a few.

The festival followed a pretty standard format, albeit with an particularly talented group of kids, many of whom were comfortable working with topics beyond their grade level. 

 Because we work with so many different ages, Nate and I will usually adapt our learning festival based off of their responses to the first few questions. We always begin by asking kids, “What is a magnet?” This question is answerable by kids of every age; however, the responses allow us to probe what depth of discussion is appropriate. The youngest kids may just say, “It sticks to metals” while the older kids may discuss polarity or distribution of charges within a metal. 

Today we were able to push much further than usual into using our motors to understand how a magnetic field is produced by a solenoid, how this relates to the frequency of oscillation in our square wave generator, and why this allows us to spin the magnetic rotor. 

I particularly enjoyed getting to meet and talk with kids at the festival today. One student, Connor, and I talked about current happenings in the aerospace industry, I’m studying aerospace engineering and I love having the opportunity to nerd out about rockets and current advances in technology. I really feel like I’m looking in a mirror sometimes at the learning festivals.

There’s only so many types of nerdy little boys: Dinosaur kids, car kids, train kids, plane/rocket kids, etc. As an aspiring aerospace engineer, it feels apparent to me that, compared to the other archetypes, the plane/rocket kids almost never really grow out of their nerd phase… and this makes me really happy. I love meeting kids that share my belief that the coolest thing humans can do is build things that allow us to go farther and faster than ever before.

After the learning festival, we got blizzards from Dairy Queen.

Charles brought us dinner from Applebees.

It was time to make some heavy decisions. One aspect of Spokes that people likely don’t consider is that we are very political. Not in the sense that we take a stance on societal issues, but rather that, within our team, there’s a lot of difficult decisions and complex things that have to be sorted out to give us the best chance of accomplishing our goals for the summer. It’s kind of like playing the really old The Oregon Trail video game, except it’s real life and we all have to work together to decide what is best for our team.

Yesterday, Caroline was bitten by a dog. This region of the Kentucky is notorious for having dangerous dogs, and any route we take to get to our destination tomorrow will take us through places that will certainly result in repeated dog encounters. Understandably, the majority of our team was not particularly in favor of biking tomorrow on the basis of safety. However, I, along with some others expressed a desire to bike despite the risk.

The Spokes team meetings play out a bit like what I imagine the constitutional conventions were like: everybody expressing passionate ideas about what to do next, and the team ultimately arriving at some middle ground that pleases the most people. 

We ultimately decided that we should prepare to facilitate allowing team members to make the decision for themselves whether or not they wanted to bike. Additionally, we should come up with a plan to SAG every biker out if necessary. After conducting a general survey of how people felt about this portion of the route given everything that had occurred in the past day, it became clear that we would need to acquire a new vehicle for a few days in order to accommodate everyone. Our van can accommodate 2 people; 3 people max if Nunu gets really creative with packing. We decided to rent a truck, which would allow us to carry five bikers and their bikes, incase we encounter a particularly dire situation.

With that, the Spokes politics have concluded. Stay tuned to find out whether or not I survive biking through the pawpocalypse.

– Drew