Rest Day in Bryce Canyon National Park — 0 mi, 0 ft
Technically, this blog starts at midnight when some of us were watching the first 5 minutes of Cars 2 after having finished watching Cars. Everyone was super tired after a ~50 mile day but the absurdity of Cars 2 required a quick preview. The Cars vs Cars 2 debate is also a highly contentious topic on the team, only after the infamous “Best Burger” debate, so it felt necessary. Somehow, there’s an argument to be made that the movie Cars 2 will have long lasting effects on our summer – you’ll have to keep reading + read tomorrow’s blog to find out why though.
After sleeping around 12:30am, we woke up at a sloth-like 10am. The team all woke up super slowly, with some people not getting out of bed until 10:30am when breakfast was ready.
My parents were visiting us for our rest day in Bryce Canyon. I’m super lucky that I got to spend time with them along the trip, and the rest of the team was super lucky to be blessed by their super good food (I’m a little biased, but it was actually super good).
For breakfast, my Mom made a spanish breakfast dish called huevos ahogados, which is a poached egg and tomato sauce dish adjacent to shakshuka.
After breakfast, we lounged around for two hours. The fatigue from biking and national parks was really starting to show at this point (Bryce is the fourth national park we’ve been to in the past week). While everyone was very excited to go check out a park as cool as Bryce, everyone was also super tired and no one had the motivation to wrangle the group into getting ready and leaving.
Around 12, Caroline, resident National Parks enjoyer, decided enough was enough and that it was time to leave.
From 12-12:30, I sat in the living room and witnessed what I could only describe as if I was sitting in the main “hangout” area of a 90s sitcom. The characters kept entering and exiting the scene but were never all in the scene at the same time because no one wanted to wait if everyone else wasn’t ready. Peak spokes behavior. Eventually, though, the episode came to an end and all the characters arrived in the living room at the same time and we were able to leave.
We drove ~5 minutes to Bryce Canyon to do the Sunrise Point/Wall Street hike – the canonical Bryce Canyon hike down into the canyon and through the hoodoos1. The hike was ~2 miles, ~600 feet of elevation gain, and absolutely stunning.
The hike into and out of the canyon required hiking some very tight switchbacks which was super easy on the way down… Unfortunately my sister and mom had a less enjoyable time on the way back up, prompting the team to donate most of their water to them and ask many times if they needed to stop in the shade (they often did).
At some point, the team introduced my parents to the term “Aarushi Gap”, which describes the observed phenomenon of a gap in a group of bikers where Aarushi is the leading biker following the gap. My dad really enjoyed this term – using it often throughout the hike (not necessarily at Aarushi’s expense, but not not necessarily). He even attempted to push the frontier of the Aarushi Gap research space by proposing the Aarushi Gravitational Gap Conjecture (AGGC), which states that those near Aarushi will be pulled towards her and slowed down accordingly, after observing that my Mom was walking slowly with Aarushi far behind the rest of the group. I think the AGGC is likely based on a confounded variable though: my Mom was just tired and Aarushi was nicely waiting for her.
After certain members of our group had recovered from the hike, we drove over to a few more view points and then the visitor center. At one view point, we spotted a food truck called “Hoodoo’s Food”, which Aarushi claimed should be renamed to “Hoodoo’s Foodoos”.
We then left Bryce and went to this shopping area and looked around at a souvenir shop for a bit.
Afterwards, my parents got their second taste of average Spokes behavior when we stood around in the parking lot for 5 minutes trying to decide if we wanted to get ice cream, get a burger, or go home. In the end, Nunu asserted a decision by jaywalking across the street to the ice cream place, prompting everyone to follow. Drew went to get a burger though, no surprise there.
After getting ice cream, Nunu jaywalked (criminal behavior) back to the other side to go to a cafe. Then Caroline did as well. The rest of us stood around in the parking lot for literally 10 minutes waiting for them, and then of course the rest of the team eventually followed into the cafe.
At this point, my parents (and me too) wanted to go home – my parents because they needed to finish dinner, I was just bored. As we prepared to leave in my parents’ rental car, the rest of the team came running out just in time and joined us on our way back home.
We all drove back to the Airbnb around 5 and lounged/napped for 2 hours while my dad finished slow cooking the pork shoulder that would become our pulled pork dinner. I spent my 2 hours taking a nap, eating watermelon and cold leftover steak from last night, and going on a 6 mile run. My hopes for the summer are to not lose all my running progress since biking doesn’t translate super well to running, but its not looking good 😢
I got back around 7:15, showered, and put Cars 2 on the TV in the living room. Eventually, the entire team was in the living room watching Cars 2 until dinner was ready.
We enjoyed a delicious meal of super tender pulled pork, homemade pickled onions, and a super secret recipe pasta salad and potato salad (the secret ingredient is finding a nearby grocery store).
After dinner, my parents surprised me with a birthday cake since my birthday is next week and they wont be here for it which was fun.
Then we got ready for sleep. For Tatiana, this entailed cleaning her bike bag in which her dog mace had exploded the day before. This inevidabtly led to lots of coughing and some tears after Tatiana found out the pepper spray was certainly not washed out of the bag. Poor Caroline also fell victim to some pepper spray since she was on laundry that day and needed to go into the laundry room where Tatiana was cleaning her bag.
The next step for getting ready for bed is brushing your teeth. If you’re Tatiana, this means you wash your mouth with the hands you were using to clean out your pepper-sprayed bike bag. You can imagine how that went.
I’m driving tomorrow so I put Cars 2 back on so I could watch a bit more with my parents, but the rest of the team has a 100 mile ride into Zion National Park so they needed to sleep in order to wake up at 6am in the morning.
So explain to me why the entire team, besides Drew, ended up in the living room watching Cars 2 as well until 11pm. This prompted them to push the wakeup time to 7am without telling Drew.
Surely this won’t have any implications tomorrow. Oh boy, what a cliff hanger.
– Nate
1 Hoodoos are tall, thin spires of rock sculpted by rain, ice, and wind in arid regions like badlands. They feature a soft rock pillar protected by a hard rock capstone (National Park Service). Hoodoo’s Rock formations [are] formed by erosion. Freezing snow, wind, & rain have all played a part in creating the spectacular Hoodoo’s (the back of my shirt).
MIT Spokes 2026 
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