Mammoth Cave, KY to Bowling Green, KY — 35.6 mi, 1393 ft
Reading the latest blogs, it feels like emotional whiplash the way the team has experienced the lowest of lows and highest of highs together, often within the span of a couple hours. In the last week, I crashed headfirst into a tree, Caroline got bit by a dog, Tatiana sprained her ankle, Nate/Tatiana/Drew battled through a literal war zone of rabid dogs, Nunu/Drew’s butts have been on fire, Caroline/me’s numb hands are losing fine motor skills, we’ve all gotten some of the worst sleep of our life, and all while biking a few hundred miles. At the same time, we’ve rock scrambled up a gorgeous secluded emerald-moss-green waterfall that I stuck my face in and felt reborn, danced on top of stools on a splash pad in the middle-of-nowhere Kentucky pretending it was Ibiza, listened to Riptide around a bonfire on a warm summer night, slept in hammocks underneath the stars, and eaten free meal after free meal, all thanks to the kindness of dozens of strangers we’ve gotten the chance to meet. As the normalcy of this insane routine has been settling in, I’ve been forgetting lately that the rest of the world is still spinning as it usually does. My family is still following the same routine I’ve witnessed for ten years, my friends are still waking up to go work their internships every morning, my lab is still working on the research projects I left a month ago, and I’m in some la la land where my main concern is that my blog is late.*
I’ve been lucky to have had some pretty amazing summers and IAPs in my four years at MIT, yet every time I come back to campus and get back into my normal semester routine, what had previously seemed like some of the best moments of my life quickly fade into some distant fever dream. I always wish I somehow had a better record of my life but I am ordinarily too lazy to actually do anything about it, so alas it has stayed merely a wish. Until this summer. And so, I will now describe to you today’s events in as much detail as I can muster.
It seems like everybody’s circadian rhythm has adjusted to the 6 AM daily wakeups, because everyone was up around the campsite before Tatiana’s alarm rang at 9 AM, our latest wakeup of the summer. We were biking in the afternoon today because we booked a 11:45 AM Mammoth Cave Historical Tour. Today marked the HISTORIC RETURN OF SPOKES 2026 because for the first time in a week, everybody was ready to bike, in spite of lingering injuries and dog fears. It was the second shortest route of the summer, a beautiful 35-mile downhill, and I was the chud* who was driving it, selflessly switching my driving day with Tatiana so she could spend more time with her boyfriend Noah who was coming to visit this weekend.
Since nobody else wanted to drive, we had to return the extra car we had rented while half the team was sagged out these last few days. Nunu and I decided to make use of our later morning to go return it to our destination for the day, Bowling Green. I learned how to drive the massively wide ½-ton Ford F-150 pickup truck for the first time, checking the side view mirrors every fifteen seconds to make sure I was still barely within the lane lines. Nunu was driving our team minivan, whose overhead storage bag was now pretty empty as our camping gear had been taken out for the night. We’d previously run into some issues driving the minivan with a flaccid overhead bag (stuff falling out on a side road in Luray; the bag itself half falling off on the freeway in Elkhorn City…) yet we still didn’t think to remove it before starting off to BG. Speeding down I-65, I saw the back of the bag thumping up and down on the car roof, so I kept an extra careful eye on it to make sure nothing flew out. Unfortunately, I lost Nunu halfway down the interstate since I was driving cautiously with the F-150, until I get a call from her as I take the exit: the bag had completely unzipped on the highway. As I went to fill the truck up with gas, she took stock of what was left in the Enterprise parking lot. Two camping pillows, a sleeping pad, a camping chair, a hammock, and Caroline’s nice blanket had been lost in the wind (they were nowhere to be seen even when I drove down I-65 again later that day). Nunu and I drove back to the team feeling like serious chuds*; even the extra $100 the kind Enterprise lady gave back to us for returning our rental a day early didn’t improve our moods. The chud-est part of it all was that right as we pulled into our campsite, we felt the first drops of rainfall, and found out that there was a flood warning issued with thunderstorms predicted for all day. So we probably shouldn’t have even returned that extra rental car.
We arrived five minutes after we were supposed to have been checked out of the campsite to our whole team suited up and ready to load the car. We threw everything in and biked to the national park’s visitor center, just barely making it to our tour group in time.
I actually really enjoyed the cave tour, which I spent goofing off saying stupid stuff to the rest of the team, making sure we stayed at the front of the line, taking really blurry photos to put in my blog, resisting the urge to touch every rock I walked past, and trying to remember everything the guide said so I can repeat it back to you all. The legend goes that Mammoth Cave was discovered by a guy named John Houchin, who stumbled upon its cool breeze while hunting a bear in 1797. The cave became a hotspot for saltpeter mining, a key ingredient in gunpowder, from 1810-1815, with the value of a pound of saltpeter increasing from two cents to a dollar to back to nothing in the span of those five years, as America cut itself off from trade with Great Britain during the War of 1812 and then went right back to it. In 1816, a year after everyone had abandoned the site, somebody who was looking to buy it came knocking, and the cave has been an active visitor tour site since. The cave is full of artifacts from indigenous people dating back to 5000 BCE, everything from stone tools to limestone tombs containing human bodies with skin and nails intact. It’s also the longest cave system in the entire world!!
That paragraph pretty much sums up everything we learned on the whole tour. After two hours of looking at rocks, we were famished as usual and we replenished our bodies with cheeseburgers and pizza at the overpriced visitor center cafe. Despite the thunderstorm forecast, we felt barely a few drops of rain so our fearless bikers decided to continue forward with the plan to bike, starting off around 3 PM (our latest start to date).
As the driver, I instead went to the Mammoth Cave Post Office to mail the postcard I had picked up earlier in the visitor center to my family. As the performative young adult I am, I’ve collected postcards from wherever I’ve gone around the world but always just as wall decor. Thanks to WikiHow, I learned how to actually mail a postcard for the first time in Virginia, and, copying my teammates, I’m trying to send one to my family from every state (SURPRISE!). Now that I’ve found out how they’re actually meant to be used, postcards really are such a cute concept!! It feels like I’m slipping in a sweet secret surprise every time I slip the card through the slot of the blue USPS mailbox.
After that, I drove to our one and only rest stop for the day: BUC-EE’s!!!!! I had been told by my fellow Texan teammates that BUC-EE’s was like if Costco was a gas station convenience store, like if the American Dream could come true from aisles of gummies and soda and fudge and brisket sandwiches, because there was nothing more American than the row of soda fountains only being available in 32 (L) or 44 oz (XL) cups—except maybe the rows and rows of AMERICA’S 250TH merch. As soon as I walked inside those doors, I lost myself. Red, white, and blue kool-aid ran through my veins as I ran through every aisle scoping my options, the white of my eyes as wide as saucer plates as I took in the enormity of the snack selection before me, and I thought to myself, how amazing what capitalism has done for our country. Nunu, Nate, and I finally settled on an electrolyte can, sour peach gummies, caramel popcorn, candied almonds, lemon soda, cheese and pretzels, and an XXL brisket sandwich. Caroline, Carmen, Drew, and Tatiana split another XXL brisket sandwich, rainbow-sprinkle cookie dough, dark chocolate caramel fudge, spicy pickles, watermelon, and Arizona soda. As we sat in a circle on the cement outside BUC-EE’s to devour our haul, the sudden amazement, patriotism, and greed for capitalism that took over me was quickly replaced by a fierce belief in communism: I held out my hand for a piece of every snack that every Spokes member had bought. Team tax isn’t cheap.
When the bikers left for Bowling Green, I went straight for our Airbnb to unload all our bags. When I saw what greeted me upon arrival, I literally wept tears of joy and jumped for joy at the same time. Two neighboring townhouses, each with 3 full bedrooms and bathrooms, a kitchen with an island, a cozy living and dining room, in-unit laundry, and all brand spanking new. We each got our own bedrooms to sleep in. Let me repeat that: WE EACH HAD OUR VERY OWN BEDROOMS COMPLETE WITH A KING SIZE BED!!!! After cold campground nights and deflated air mattresses and three people crammed on sofa couches, this was genuinely heaven. I literally cannot thank our hosts enough: Sam, our thoughtful Bowling Green learning festival coordinator, and Adam and Lindsey, the couple who very kindly let us stay in their home for free.
I singlehandedly unloaded every single thing in the car to make enough space for all eight seats in the car to go up, so we could drive around together on the following rest day + learning festival day. As I stocked the fridge with two of every kind of soda/drink we had so every possible option would be cold for the team upon arrival, I felt like a serious hero. Until I later realized that Tatiana’s boyfriend Noah was coming tomorrow with an extra rental car, and nobody really drank anything I had put in the fridge, so may be I was DTM*. I don’t mind though; my favorite part of being the driver is being able to do things that make the team happy.
I joined the team at Thai Thai, where they had stopped 3 miles before the end for a free dinner graciously provided by the restaurant owners. After days of fried chicken in Kentucky, the vegetables and noodles and basil and fried rice seriously hit the spot. A huge huge thank you and shout out to Thai Thai of Bowling Green; the best Thai food I’ve had in a long time!
When we came back to the Airbnb, we allocated one hour of shower and blogging time until 10:30 PM, when the moment I had been waiting for for eighteen days finally came. I had genuinely been asking the team every single day what the move was tonight and if tonight was the night, to the point where it felt like I was Curry shooting from the moon hoping one night I make the basket, and the joke became that it would never happen all summer. I am talking, of course, about MOVIE NIGHT!!!!!
I was actually so excited I thought I would explode from happiness as Nunu put on We’re The Millers, a comedy about a small-time pot dealer turned international drug smuggler with the help of a fake family of four he put together (The Millers) to look less suspicious. Although half the team went to bed before the movie finished, I thought it was really funny so shoutout Nunu for a great pick.
And then I also went to sleep, splayed out across my king bed in the master bedroom. It’s crazy how in one day you can wake up with every muscle feeling like lead in a sleeping bag that smells like feet and then end the very same day with all your dreams coming true.
Sending love to you all as per usual,
Aarushi
*For reference I timed this blog and it took me 8 hours across 5 days (1, 3, 1, 1, 2). Hope you enjoyed the detail because this might never happen again.
*In modern slang, “buss” (often used as “bussin”) means that something is excellent, impressive, or amazing. It is primarily used by Gen Z and younger generations to describe great food or a really fun experience. Common Usages: “This taco is bussin!” (The food tastes incredible.) “That party last night was bussin.” (The event was a lot of fun.) (citation: Google AI Overview, 2026).
*In internet slang, a chud is a derogatory term used to insult someone perceived as boorish, unintelligent, or socially maladjusted. It comes from the 1984 sci-fi horror film C.H.U.D., which stands for Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dweller—a movie about radioactive, man-eating sewer mutants. On platforms like Reddit, Twitter/X, and political forums, it is used to describe toxic, bad-faith internet trolls or far-right reactionaries.Outside of politics, it is often used similarly to words like “nerd,” “creep,” or “loser,” specifically implying that someone is physically unappealing, socially awkward, and terminally online. Interestingly, the term has recently been co-opted by some young internet users as a self-deprecating joke to describe themselves when feeling hopeless or “cringy”. (citation: Google AI Overview, 2026).
*DTM most commonly stands for the internet slang “doing too much”. It is used to call out someone who is being overly dramatic, over-the-top, or trying way harder than a situation requires. Think of it as a quick, modern way to tell someone to chill out or relax. (citation: Google AI Overview, 2026).
MIT Spokes 2026 
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