Day 67: Inside the Mind of One of This Generation’s Greatest Thinkers

Eureka, NV to Austin, NV — 75 mi, 3038 ft ~Mt. Airy, NV — 90 mi, 3698 ft

I’ve heard there is much anticipation for this blog to drop, and for good reason. Today I will share with you every single thought I had while biking 90 miles. This might be an incredibly boring blog or it might be the most fascinating one, depending on how much you care about great thinkers and deep philosophers and cool funny smart hot people (me) and the like. Regardless, this will be the most accurate blog, because whether fascinating or boring, this is what we actually we do all day. Nothing but the thoughts in my head for 67 days straight… I thought surely I should be enlightened by now. But why do I feel the exact same? Has no profound change, no grand realization, no heavenly moment of enlightenment come upon me by now?? What the heck do I think about all day???? Let’s dig in.

In the morning, nothing notable happened. It was like every other morning after another extremely mediocre night of floor sleep and slathering chamois butter on our butts and asking ourselves what the heck are we doing, followed by a very sad breakfast of Nature Valley Bar. We set off at 9:30 AM. On the first leg, I was thinking about:

• My mom, because it’s her BIRTHDAY TODAY!!!!!11 WOOOHOOOOOo!!!!1 
• What my family is doing for my mom’s birthday
• How cute it is that my brother and my dad and his two college friends who are visiting made breakfast for my mom, and how great I am for proposing this idea to my brother last night
• The crop circles that we were biking by, and this alien conspiracy documentary on the History Channel that I watched in 7th grade which argued that crop circles were signs of alien spaceships landing
• How much I hated that 7th grade language arts teacher, and how much she loved frogs
• Why are crop circles circular? Is there an engineering reason?
• How I can’t listen to music today because I am recording voice memos all day about my thoughts so I remember them
• My dad seeing his CORE 4 today (his GOAT friend group of 4 from college) for the first time in 28 years. The last time was at one of their weddings and now they are meeting again for one of their son’s weddings
• Realistically how often will I see my CORE 4? Will it also just be at weddings? I’m sure my dad didn’t plan on seeing his friends only at weddings but that’s how it happened
• It won’t be 28 more years because surely they will all four come to my wedding
• My wedding is surely going to be some epic party. I’ve thought about my wedding a lot but never in a concrete way like who I would get married to. Just that it will be some epic party
• My dad’s friends who are visiting the bay for this wedding and how they are just doing jobless things together like going shopping and to the beach
• I wonder if these jobless experiences have more value because they have jobs
• Is this going to be my life when I get a job? Having to take PTO to have fun? Worrying about how much PTO I am taking? How do you make sure to live your life not just in PTO? Or just on the weekends?
• How my brother has a job and how weird it is that my little brother has a job
• He watched the new Spiderman movie after work last night and called me on the way home. I really want to watch Spiderman
• How having a job is what most people aspire to
• How we are nearing the end of SPOKES and I will stop spending every single moment of my life with these people. Wake up roll over see Carmen’s face. Go to the bathroom brush my teeth make eye contact with Nunu in the mirror. Soon going back to living my life alone. I guess I’ve never actually lived alone before. In college I had roommates. Before college I had my family. I don’t even know what my life will look like alone
• How bright the stars were yesterday when we cowboy camped (slept in sleeping bags without tents) in the church parking lot. So many stars I wasn’t even picking out constellations. You only pick out constellations when there’s only a few stars in the sky that you can connect. But there were lots and lots of stars
• Biking through sagebrush and smelling sagebrush everywhere. Tires slipping in the sand
• When does my life become my parent’s life? This stable life that I always thought was so boring? Probably soon, no? 
• I would rather just bike on the paved road than to save a couple miles on this unpaved path detour, which is some seriously unwieldy sandy cattle field path
• Just nothing for miles and miles and miles on end but this sagebrush. How does anything even live here? The sagebrush doesn’t even have green leaves; they’re blue-ish. Probably C4 photosynthesis

• Of course, thinking about C4 photosynthesis always reminds me of my favorite Wikipedia page, Timeline of the far future. It predicts:
  • In 800-900 million years, “Carbon dioxide levels will fall to the point at which C₄ photosynthesis is no longer possible. Without plant life to recycle oxygen in the atmosphere, free oxygen and the ozone layer will disappear from the atmosphere allowing for intense levels of deadly UV light to reach the surface. Animals in food chains that were dependent on live plants will disappear shortly afterward. At most, animal life could survive about 3 to 100 million years after plant life dies out. Extinction will start with large animals, then smaller animals and flying creatures, then amphibians, followed by reptiles and, finally, invertebrates. In the book The Life and Death of Planet Earth, authors Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee state that some animal life may be able to survive in the oceans. Eventually, however, all multicellular life will die out. The first sea animals to go extinct will be large fish, followed by small fish and then, finally, invertebrates. The last animals to go extinct will be animals that do not depend on living plants, such as termites, or those near hydrothermal vents, such as worms of the genus Riftia. The only life left on the Earth after this will be single-celled organisms. A 2026 study by Haq-Misra and Wolf suggests that those plants that use CAM photosynthesis, like cacti could survive until 1.84 billion years from now.”
• The college essay I wrote about this Wikipedia page
• Thinking a lot about college ending. How I thought I would have so much time this summer to process the four years of life that just happened to me, what I want to do next, the ways I have been profoundly changed by undergrad. But I don’t feel enlightened at all. I thought I would be a different person by the end of the summer. I don’t really know what concrete change I had envisioned (I did think I would be a lot more jacked than I actually am), but something like wow this is some spiritual insight/aura/knowledge/confidence/whatever you can only get by really seeing the whole country, listening to stories from people from all over… I guess I have done those things, but I feel the same. Maybe it’s only in hindsight.
• What if I’m the same person after my gap year too? What use is that year of my life then? Why is there always that fear that I’m wasting my time?
• Should I really include all these thoughts in my blog
• Feeling a little aimless. All I know is that I have a flight to Boston booked the day after I bike into SF for Camp Kesem. No return flight. When should I return? Should I return from Boston or from New York? What will I do in New York for those few days? Where will I stay? I don’t know the answer to any of these questions. Is this how life is supposed to be lived? When you’re 22 and with no plan? Just sleep on someone’s couch?
• I’m reading this book, Intermezzo by Sally Rooney. It’s about two brothers: one is 22 and one is 32. The 32-year-old is dating a 22-year-old, which is kind of weird, but it’s less weird because of the way she describes their minds. Like even if you don’t approve of this relationship, you can understand, separately, why both of them are in it. Which is interesting because I’ve never understood age gap relationships before. Anyway, it made me realize life really changes a lot when you’re 32. You can’t really do this kind of thing at 32. Not knowing what the plan is for your life or even for the day. The only plan being somehow get to Austin, Nevada. At 32 hopefully I want to have a plan
• Thinking a lot about my Arizona iced tea I’m going to drink at the first rest stop. I decided I’m going to do a liquid diet today, which is where I just drink a bunch of sugary drinks at the rest stops so I don’t have to eat any carbs. I’m sick of stuffing my face with Cheez-Its and garbage and don’t even get me started on eating another bar. I don’t want to really eat a proper meal either though; the thought of making myself a sandwich on the side of the boiling hot highway… 🤮. But I need carbs, so liquid diet it is. The lineup is Arizona iced tea, then lemon iced tea, then Snapple iced tea or perhaps a Vitamin Water
• I was never a drinks person before this summer because I always had it engrained in me that juice and soda are the easiest ways to eat wayyy too much sugar. One can, bam, 60 grams. So I never got into having little drinkies with my meals—except for a good coffee
• Will I continue to eat this way after Spokes? How do I not lose all this fitness?
• I wish I could transcribe my thoughts straight from my head I am sick of talking. My thoughts make way more sense in my head. They sound a lot stupider when I verbalize them
• Still on this sandy path detour and it is seriously not worth it. My tire is literally sinking into the sand every time I pedal. I think we are biking into someone’s private property
• What is my life… walking my bike on a path full of sand in the middle of nowhere in the Nevada desert on a Thursday
• What is my diet… no proper breakfast (a Fairlife and a Nature Valley breakfast bar), then a bunch of drinks throughout the day (mostly iced tea especially for the caffeine kick), and for dinner probably a burger. This can’t be the diet of performance athletes. They’re always drinking all these Gu gels and energy bars and all… how much of that is marketing, and how much of it is useful? Are $5 Clif energy gummies really better than 10¢ gummy worms?
• [Lots more complaining about the sand. Most of us are walking our bikes at this point. Lots of looking forward to the first rest stop. Some bad words are said.]
• I think about movies a lot. How I’m really into movies, and stories in general. Especially stories that people have told me, like people on this trip. What about it is so appealing to me? The human aspect of it, I think
• For someone biking across America this summer, I feel like I still don’t know that much about bikes. I know how to change tubes, take wheels off, pump tires, lube chains… that’s pretty much it. Again I don’t exactly know what skills I wanted to get out of this summer but I definitely thought I would be more of a bike expert by the end of it
• I’m not clipping in anymore because I am going snail pace and perpetually feel like I am about to fall, precariously balancing as my wheel wobbles through the sand
• Why do I not feel one with my bike? Obviously I feel very comfortable and natural on my bike, especially when getting back on after a rest day or something, but I still don’t feel like it is simply an extension of my body. Like this sandy road should feel easy peasy, but I’m still feeling scared at times
• I keep thinking about our five year Spokes reunion. I don’t really care where we go (hopefully outside the US) but I really really want it to happen, even if just for a week
• How we’re going on a bunch of random roads across the US—why are these roads even there? Who goes on them? Like this road is genuinely in the middle of nowhere in the desert, eventually leading back to Highway 50. The highway has so many of these random offshoots of tiny roads that I never see anybody on
• How does Nunu always have so much energy? How do we as a group have so much energy? This is a very self-selecting group of high energy individuals. Everybody is always down to do stuff, even after long bike day. I’m realizing that being high-energy is a key criteria I have subconsciously selected for in many of my friends
• ARGHH I made a wrong turn 👹
• Wow being back on pavement feels so freaking good

• Thinking about what I was thinking about yesterday. I was listening to Green Light by Lorde. That song always makes me think about the green light at the end of the drop in The Great Gatsby. I’ve always been fascinated by that green light. I don’t know what it is about it—the hope for something, the promise that something is out there for you, the act of yearning? That’s what made me start thinking earlier about why I’m so fascinated by movies. Maybe it’s genetic. My dad also loves movies
• Lately I’ve been having a lot of ideas for my post-grad life at Berkeley. I want to host weekly movie nights at my apartment. Hopefully I’ll have a good group going; it’s fluid, people come the weeks where they can. Like a movie club equivalent of book clubs (why hasn’t someone invented this already). I really just want to watch good movies with people and have a good discussion about it afterward. Most of the time when you watch a movie with a big group, the laughing and chatting and unseriousness often diminishes the value of the movie. It’s usually in the context of hanging out and chilling, so usually you end up watching some stupid stilly funny movie, not a serious work of art. And most people are not very interested in this discussion aspect afterwards
• In this craving for discussion I listened to a podcast on Pulp Fiction for two hours yesterday while biking, which we had watched the night before. I understand its hype; It’s definitely one of the top movies I’ve ever watched
• It also got me thinking about how cool it would be to make a movie. There are a couple things I’ve always thought would be cool to do, perhaps in my gap year before Berkeley. They’re not actually realistic because I don’t actually have the skillset for any of them, but I’d love to make a movie, be on the set of a fashion week, learn to surf in Thailand, bartend in Europe, etc. These are all alternate life paths I could have lead—not something I want to do permanently (I don’t think I would actually be satisfied) but lives I wish I could experience. But I can’t squish all these lives into one gap year. Hopefully my life isn’t going to end after this gap year, hopefully at other points in my life I can screw off and do all these things
• I’m excited to write this blog. Hopefully my thoughts make sense. Hopefully I can hear the audio in these voice recordings. I’ve been thinking about this blog idea for a while because I’m seriously curious about what I actually think about while biking. I have a feeling it’s a small repetitive circular list of topics
• I’m seriously rawdogging* this ride. I can’t listen to anything because I’m recording all these voice memos. Endless highway in an endless desert, biking alone without even music in my ears… just me and my thoughts
• Am I ever going to get enlightened? I was planning on going on this 10-day silent Vipassana meditation retreat that my parents and aunt have done in the hopes of reaching some kind of enlightenment, but if I haven’t done much thinking even with 75 days alone with my thoughts, maybe it’s over for me
• Maybe enlightenment is something you realize you achieved in hindsight? In hindsight, I have become more enlightened over these last four years: I care less about things, things piss me off less, I’m generally more go-with-the-flow, I’m less anal about minor things, I’ve realized some things aren’t worth arguing over
• Rest stop is in sight. I bet we’re going to talk about how bad this sand portion was

The rest stop was like every other rest stop we’ve had in the last week: on the side of Highway 50, sitting on the ground of the shoulder, trying and failing to find a patch of shade from the car because the sun is usually almost directly overhead, slurping on Nate’s big drinks haul, and pretty brief.

• This rest stop I had an Arizona iced tea, a handful of nuts, and an Orea thin. Already thinking about how excited I am for my next lemon iced tea at the next rest stop
• It was a slow process to convert everyone to this sugary drink lifestyle. Drew was our fearless pioneer with his four daily Pepsis
• How much personal money am I spending on this trip? If I thought on campus, it was easy to justify a $7 Blue Bottle Nola because I was having a bad day and needed a pre-midterm treat, biking 80 miles makes it 10x easier to justify spending $11 on various drinks throughout the day
• I thought Nevada is a flat desert, but there are mountains in the distance everywhere I look. Even the word Nevada looks like mountains. Apparently Nevada is actually the most mountain-ious state in the US!
• Thinking about how endless this road is. Because there is nothing there, the visibility is crazy: you can see the road more than fifteen miles into the distance, which makes it seem even more endless. Just going to be biking on here, the whole day, endlessly… Yellow flowers along the edges of the highway, sagebrush everywhere in the distance… Sorry Sarah, I’ve officially decided my least favorite state…
• It’s actually surprising how populated the US is. It seems more natural that there would be nothing for 75 miles until we reach tonight’s destination than having gas stations and parks and churches and small towns every 30 miles like on the east coast
• For being “The Loneliest Road in America”, Highway 50 in Nevada isn’t actually that lonely. There has to be some traffic, I suppose, for being the only road connecting the cities we are passing through. Our loneliest stretches were probably in Utah
• What makes someone fast at biking? Do you just have to put more effort in? I’ve gotten faster organically throughout the trip but I’m plateauing now. Probably because most days I’ve never cared to put that much effort in while biking
• Lemon iced tea 💭
• I feel kind of crazy. I’ve just been talking to myself into the voice memo app of my phone all day
• I have so many peopole I was supposed to call. I was supposed to become a caller this summer. I really started slacking off on that mission once the service got spotty and I discovered audiobooks. Audiobooks are nice because you can just turn your brain off and listen. It gets tiring to talk on call, especially trying to talk loud enough so that the person I’m calling can hear me over the wind. But every time I do call someone I miss, I remember why people call each other and catch up
• I don’t know why calling is such a high activation energy task for me, like replying to my texts
• I seriously need to start inviting people to this end-of-spokes party. The Partiful is looking mad empty. It’s only eight days away (!!)
• I wish I was home for longer than 24 hours. I’m flying back to Boston literally the night after we bike into SF for Camp Kesem, a yearly summer camp I help run for kids facing a parent’s cancer
• Hopefully I’ll be a good camp counselor, especially since I have more of a leadership role this year at Kesem. This fear always creeps in every August before camp
• Will camp feel less exhausting this year, now that I’ve done this for 75 days? Surely nothing will be as exhausting as this trip. I don’t think I’ve ever done anything exhausting for this long. I’ve definitely had finals seasons that are way more exhausting, but it’s only for a week or two and then I go home and do nothing for a bit
• I want to go home and do nothing for a month. But I fear that my parents and everyone they know will just think I’m a bum, even though I’m resting. Sometimes I get jealous of my many friends that have gotten to just rest this summer, to just chill and be a bum at home
• That’s what I did the summer before college. I think about that beautiful summer sometimes. I can never really conjure in my memory what exactly I did all day in those three months, but I just remember I was happy. I did nothing super useful and life was good. What a privilege it was to be a bum
• Lemon iced tea 💭

• Maybe I should drink more water. I am probably dehydrated if I keep thinking about lemon iced tea all the time
• Very windy. I don’t think the voice memo audio will come out very well
• Glad it’s mostly flat today, except for a big climb at the end. Which will be buns!!
• How many of these thoughts should I write verbatim in my blog, and how interesting would that actually be?
  • [I ended up including pretty much all of them, and they are all pretty much verbatim]
• I don’t even know who still reads these blogs. Are they still interesting now that there’s 67 of them? Day 67 of the same day every day: we wake up, we do some rest stops, then dinner, then sleep. I guess I still read them, but I read them because they are written about myself so obviously I think it’s interesting
• Why is Drew not that far ahead of me? Is he okay?
• Soon we are going to be at sea level. There’s only five biking days left. I should probably be enjoying them more than I am
• I can’t really think about anything profound. I’m just thinking about my lemon iced tea and the fact that I’m biking forever
• After surviving off of 5 hours of sleep all of college, this summer really made me realize how important sleep is. Ran on willpower and caffeine for the last four years
• I’ve had a lot of boogers in my nose in Nevada. My nose and lips have been super dry in the desert
• Going to invite lots of people to the party tonight. Going to text many people back tonight
• So many people I want to call and catch up with before this trip ends. Though this is making me realize that I’m not the only problem. My friends haven’t been calling me either
• My best friend Ria is probably moving into her NYC apartment right now. I want to go to New York after Camp Kesem just to see Ria, but I feel like I’ll be so tired. I want to do nothing but lie in my bed for a week. Watch some shows, maybe. Except now I’m 22 years old, so it’s kind of like wow, everyone else is getting jobs but your daughter is at home being a bum? Not a good look for my parents
• I wonder what my teammates are doing right now. I wonder what they are thinking about. I always ask them what they are thinking about in a given moment
• One of my main thought topics while biking is envisioning my post-grad life at Berkeley. Honestly I don’t really think about the actual PhD research part; I think a lot more about the hobbies I want to have, how my first ever apartment will look, the events I want to host (like Movie Night Wednesdays), who I might want to live with… just unserious things. It’s easier to daydream about the concrete idea of going to Berkeley instead of my unplanned gap year before it because I have some structure to dream off of. When I think of my gap year, it’s more in the sense of still being kind of like wow I’m really just taking a year off
• Another major thought topic is what I will be doing right after Spokes ends, like going to Camp Kesem, the errands I need to run while back in Boston and which of my friends I will get to see, etc.
• Yet a third regular thought is how I’m no longer a college student, which usually queues a flashback to the very vivid memory of my last night on campus, crying to Ribs in the middle of the Number Six dance floor saying goodbye to my closest people, with everyone who had made my college experience in one room, and finally going to bed at 3 AM before waking up at 6 to drive down to DC and start Spokes. That feeling… it’s crazy how strongly you can feel about anything
• Sometimes I think, why am I feeling so many feelings? Why am I so nostalgic about everything? The truth is that you can only ever experience things once. It’s not just that I’ll never experience college again, but anything I’ve ever experienced I can’t experience again. But I would go insane if I felt nostalgic about everything; I wouldn’t be able to enjoy the next moment. So when and how do you decide to move on? What’s moving on and what’s forgetting? I don’t want to forget about college, all the people I met and the things I did and how I felt and how every single feeling felt like such a big deal, because I was 19 and I was experiencing nothing that had ever happened in my life before
• Is this too vulnerable for the internet
• I think about my personal queen of oversharing on the internet, writer and internet personality Mackenzie Thomas. It’s kind of awesome to read all her thoughts on her Substack I follow
• I got into Substack to get away from Instagram, so in the mornings I started reading random Substack articles instead of scrolling on reels. I feel at peace with my relationship with Instagram now so it definitely worked. Now I’ve upgraded even further because I read our team blogs on the toilet seat instead. Again obviously I am biased but everyone on the team is such a good writer, but in a different way. In my opinion:
  • Caroline is Most Detailed
  • Carmen is Most Reflective
  • Tatiana is Most Wholesome
  • Nate is Most Funny
  • Drew is Best Writer
  • Nunu is Most Creative
• I wish I could keep blogging during my gap year. I don’t know when I would have time to write it because this seriously takes forever, or who would even read it because I doubt my real life content will be as interesting as this summer, but I love the idea of having a record of my thoughts and experiences at a given time of my life, and I want to remember all things that happen to me
• That’s the idea of my next blog, actually, which is a century on the last full biking day of Spokes. I’m going to write about 100 things I never want to forget about Spokes, and therefore I will never forget them
• Thinking about blogs, my epic poem blog hasn’t dropped yet. I surprised myself by actually writing the whole thing as a poem, and by cranking it out in a day. I never thought I was a creative person, but over the years, I think I’ve both become more creative and broadened my definition of whatever creative means
• All these cars probably think I’m looking very cool, biking no-handed. I have this thought a lot, which is such a stupid thought to think about what oncoming cars thing. Still I think it’s cool, to finally unlock no hands
• I think about biking with my dad on the weekend when I’m in grad school, and afterwards maybe we will get some nice brunch somewhere in Berkeley downtown
• I really loved Berkeley downtown when I visited, bright and sunny and everyone walking around in Birks. Honestly it convinced me to pick Berkeley
• Oh I need to reply to my Berkeley professor’s email…
• I have so many emails to reply to. How much of a valid excuse is this cross-country bike trip? Can I just reply to everything at the end?
• It’ll be nice to have my weekends free as a grad student. I have this vision of myself going to yoga class on Sunday mornings, walking around in some cute yoga outfit I don’t currently own with my rolled up yoga mat slung around my shoulder
• Wow all those motorcycles just waved to me. I love waving. It’s so cute. And then they wave back! These random people. It’s so freaking cute
• Back to my vision. After yoga maybe I’ll go to some nice coffee shop. Maybe they’ll know me, maybe I’ll be a regular there. Maybe I would’ve found my go-to, my THE coffee shop. And I’ll read my book for a couple hours, for as long as I want. It’s going to be a beautiful life
• I daydream about Berkeley a lot, because A) I love daydreaming and B) Berkeley is the next very concrete thing in my life. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing during my gap year, so it’s hard to day dream about
• Nate just accepted my co-host request for the end of Spokes party Partiful! I really hope it goes well. I’ve never organized a party on such a massive scale. Even though it’s just a title thing, I’m glad that the rest of the team are Partiful co-hosts. It makes me feel a little less like this entire thing is solely my responsibility
• Wow there’s a car flying through some dust road and you can see its dust tracks for miles and miles
• I think a lot about this quote from one of our hosts at a church in Kansas who said that he felt claustrophobic anytime he left Kansas, because in Kansas you can see in all directions for miles and miles and miles. It’s crazy how much you can see when it’s all flat, and it’s crazy how rarely we get to be in such flat empty places. There’s roads in Nevada that you can see 15 miles out on the road, like you can see the next rest stop, and it takes you an hour to reach there
• There’s really something special about how grand and vast it is. I forget to appreciate the beauty of it all. I’m busy thinking about how I’m biking
• There’s all these metal sticks lining the entire highway
• Oh they’re reflector lights
• And every so often they have a mile marker along the highway. I don’t understand why you’d need to label every single mile of the highway, but it’s really useful for biking. I don’t have to keep checking my Garmin, which makes me feel I’m just counting down the miles, which is not a good feeling. So I just pretend the route is infinte
• More motorcycles waving. I feel like I’m part of the in group. I’m a biker
• I wish I was home because all my dad’s best friends are there for this wedding and they’re all having a good time. They’re so fun. I love hanging out with my dad’s friends. Well I love being jobless in general, and my dad barely ever does jobless things unless someone like a friend from India is visiting. His best friends went to the huge shopping outlet in Gilroy this weekend, and Carmel-By-The-Sea, and Big Sur, which are all jobless things I’m always trying to convince my family to do. My parents are serious people, though. They go to work, and then they come home and work some more. On the weekend there’s other work to be done, like fixing this and that around the house. It’s a serious life
• I don’t know how long I can keep living such an unserious life. WTF am I doing, biking in the middle of nowhere Nevada. Yesterday I slept on the asphalt parking lot of a church in the middle of the desert in a sleeping bag, and I listened to the goodbye song we sang at the end of outdoor science camp in 5th grade. More on this later
• How must it feel to drive one of these 18-wheelers? Is it even more boring than this? Probably. Damn. And where are they going? What are they doing?
• In the beginning of this trip I felt a lot more curious about my surroundings and the people I was meeting. I’m a little bit sad that I feel too accustomed and tired now to super deeply and mindfully and seriously interact with and get to know the stories of our hosts and other strangers on the road. I understand what one of our hosts back in Virginia (shoutout Dirk and Crissy) meant when they told us how refreshing it was to see us so energetic about everything at the start of our trip because usually they host Stanford Spokes at the very tail of their journey, where they (and we) are now more focused on winding down and sleeping
• How is the sky so empty?? There’s absolutely nothing in the sky except the moon still out
• Last night we saw the most vivid stars of this trip so far, since most of Nevada is a Dark Sky Zone. I was thinking about how in the olden days, they didn’t know what stars actually were. They believed that they were holes from heaven, which actually makes sense. Now that we know the science behind it, does it make stars less magical or even more magical? Knowing that while they might not be windows into heaven, this is light literally coming to us from light years away, that each star has their own planets orbiting them
• Last night we also discussed the common question that comes up when looking at the stars: if we believed aliens existed. Nate had a good point yesterday, which I’ve never thought about. In the grand scheme of things, all 14 billion years of the universe, humans only have and will exist for the tiniest fraction of time. Even if the lucky circumstances responsible for the evolution of intelligent life existed in other planets, it’s even more unlikely that they exist in any overlapping time frame as us
• Humans will probably be around for what, like 100,000 years total?
• What species has been around the longest? Probably some kind of tree or bacteria. How would you even classify that though, because wouldn’t the species evolve in that timeframe into some new species?
• I want to watch the new Spider-Man movie. I keep thinking about how it’s like the story of my life, which I know is very self-centered, but hear me out. In the last film, Peter Parker, Ned, and MJ got into MIT, and the film came out at the same time I got into MIT, and now that I just graduated MIT, Ned and MJ just graduated MIT too. My brother said the movie was very good yesterday
• He is not picking up my call now
• I don’t think this blog will be very interesting, but I am too committed now. My brother always said that I tell really boring stories, with way too many details nobody cares about
• These flies are so bold. You can literally touch them and they still won’t move
• Interesting how the highway is slightly raised off the ground, like if you fall off the highway, you fall down a small slope
• How long will it take for my butt to feel normal after Spokes? How long will I have these chafing rashes on my butt? Why are these seats so uncomfortable, even on Day 67?
• It’s kind of beautiful I’m blogging on Day 67. And it’s my mom’s birthday
• I’m going to have to listen to these insanely long and boring voice memos while I write my blog. Maybe I’ll do that on my driver day. I’m excited for my driver day. I’ve had to bike all the worst days of this trip; I’ve never missed any extremely buns days as driver. This time, though, I’m missing the bike into Tahoe up the Sierras, which I hope is buns. Not that I want it to be buns for the rest of the team. I just want it to be a good day to skip. Maybe that’s evil
• I wish I could record my thoughts with electrodes from my brain or something. I’m getting sick of talking. The issue is that I’m thinking about things all the time, hence talking all the time. I don’t understand how some people aren’t stream-of-consciousness thinkers. I actually know a lot of people in my life that aren’t thinking a lot, most of them guys. I don’t understand how you can just think about nothing
• My answer to “if you could have a superpower what would it be?” always used to be mind reading. I’m just so nosy, I want to know what people are thinking about, so I can understand them. I do see how this could backfire though; I wouldn’t want to know if someone hated me or thought I was ugly or something
• Should I do a butt break now or should I thug it out to the rest stop? There’s a hill coming up; maybe I’ll do a butt break at the top of the hill. But the hill is actually really far away. Distances are so deceiving here
• Probably my most realistic blog, just extremely boring, thinking about boring things. That’s the real Spokes life. And I’m going to miss this. Is it too early to think about Spokes ending?
• I want to go to a chiropractor at the end of this. I want him to pull me and everything cracks and stretches out
• How do you do a low sugar but still high carb diet? I guess you need savory snacks. Surely just stuffing your face with Cheez-Its is also not good for you. Also the idea of chewing dry crackers and all is so unappealing, compared to drinking lemon iced tea. Except Wheat Thins. Is the current state of our diet inevitable?

• Nevada has to be the most mind-numbing stretch. Just nothing for miles. But I should find the beauty in it, I guess, since I’ll never experience this again
• I wonder where all these cars are going
• How is it going to feel at the end? At the Golden Gate, at this party?
• I forgot to ask my friend Albert if the team could shower in his apartment before the party
• Not sure how self-centered it is to be throwing ourselves a party
• I want to throw a lot of parties when I have my own apartment. I’ll be making lots of Partifuls. What a great app
• Surely the rest stop is not that much further after this hill
• I hope they found a place to pull over for the rest stops. There’s not a lot of Google Maps street view in this area, so I just estimated where the highway pullouts are when making the rest stops last night
• My phone’s battery is draining a lot faster with these voice memos. I’ll need to use Carmen’s portable charger again. How is her portable always charged and she’s always willing to let me use it? I can’t believe I brought two portables on this trip, and one is lost and one doesn’t work anymore
• I’m seeing a mirage that our SAG car is coming up in the distance, but I think it might just be a black spot next to the highway
• There’s a huge wildfire near Austin, which is where we are going today. I wonder if we will see the wildfire smoke soon
• OMG REST STOP!! I love when I think the rest stop is super far away because I can’t see it in the distance, but all of a sudden I look right and it’s right there

Nothing special to report at the rest stop once again. Nunu and I biked together for this next leg, so here is a recap of our conversation of our joint thoughts (but unfortunately I can only hear my voice in the recordings):

• What will our purpose be after this trip, if our purpose everyday isn’t to bike 70 miles anymore?
• Both of us are bumming at home for a bit after the end of the trip. Thinking about all the big housekeeping tasks I need to do when home: clean my Mac’s disk storage, download all my MIT course content before I lose access, transfer my MIT email and Google Drive
• What do we think we will get out of Spokes? Which reminded of us of what Kate, a Spokes 2023(?) alum said about what she left Spokes with: the notion that all these big grand adventures you hear about, you can just do them, and you can keep doing them throughout your life. You don’t have to wait for other people or for the “right” time or for any of the other reasons people give
• It’s insane how much we can do in a day, and so much of that is because we are all high energy people. Even when I’m not feeling high energy, the rest of the team still pushes me to do things, like when Caroline and Nunu suggested stargazing even after a really buns biking day into Great Basin National Park
• How insanely high energy Nunu is, and how even she is confused by this finding
• How fulfillment is one of the big goals in life, which is different than having happiness as a goal. It’s very important to feel happy, but sometimes you aren’t happy even when you should be, like even when fun things and all are happening—it’s probably because you’re not feeling fulfilled
• We have to keep this momentum through our gap year, making it a fulfilling year. I have faith, but right now it’s just faith and no plan
• We talked about what we wish/pray for. For me, the general gist is praying for good things in my life and in the lives of the people around me, but the specific “good things” change depending on the moment. Nunu always wishes to be happy
• Oh shoot I have been so focused on voice memos I forgot to take photos for my blog…
• The highway mile markers reset at the county line
• I described the Shooting Star song for Nunu, the song we sang leaving outdoor camp in 5th grade and that I played for Carmen last night. It’s a really sweet and sad song. It talks about how all these people we met and bonded with at camp are like a shooting star passing through our lives, and we can only hope that one day we can meet them again. And if we can’t ever meet them again, at least we can take solace in the fact that we can just sit and remember them sometimes
  • Please won’t you catch
  • A shooting star for me
  • And take it with you on your way
  • Though it seems like we’ve just met
  • You’re the one I won’t forget
  • Hope some kind wind blows you back my way
  • And I’ve been thinking maybe somewhere later down the road
  • After all our stories have been told
  • I’ll sit and think of you
  • The dear friend I once knew
  • Shot through my life like a shooting star.
• Maybe I’ll play this song in Tahoe, if the moment is right. Lots of talking about the bonding things we want to do in Tahoe
• It’s crazy how our teammates know such an intimate part of ourselves
• Last semester for my Producing Podcasts class final project, my best friend Albert and I sat with a booth in Boston Commons and had random strangers passing by be guests on our podcast, all for the glory of $1. We had such a cute wholesome experience and such interesting conversations with people of all ages that I’ve thought a lot about doing it again, maybe in SF or Berkeley this time. If you want to listen to it:

• What should we eat at this next rest stop?

Maybe really nothing notable happened at this rest stop, maybe I’ve forgotten the details from a month ago. Anyway,

• At the last rest stop I knew I was climbing 2000 feet the next 10 miles. I was not looking forward to it. Tummy hurting. Feeling extremely hot. Dehydrated. Everything dry, face so dry. Onset of a slight headache, perhaps. And already 60 miles done. Now climbing 2000 feet. I was not excited. So? I used a cheat code.
• I already cheated on this alone-with-my-thoughts only thinking day. I called my mom because of course, it’s her birthday, and then my dad called me. This time I distracted myself from the oncoming mountain with my audiobook, Intermezzo by Sally Rooney
• When we first started into Nevada, I realized how quiet the road is. There isn’t much wind in the desert, and there are hardly any cars whizzing by on The Loneliest Road in America, and so I could finally listen to a serious audiobook off my ever-growing notes app reading list instead of Percy Jackson / Heroes of Olympus. I already told you what it’s about, two brothers grieving after the loss of their father, their relationship with each other, and their relationships with the women in their lives. I really enjoy listening to the scenes of them interacting with one another, painting a portrait of their relationship, and I’m getting less and less interested in their romantic lives, which are progressing extremely slowly. Which maybe is the point of the book. Real life romances develop slowly
• I’m trying to remember what I found interesting in the book to tell you because that’s what I was thinking about at that time. The part of the book I just ended on was a scene where the two brothers just met for dinner. They were talking about how there was a time in both of their lives where they were triumphant. They were winning a lot. They were on a winning streak. For the brother who is 32, it was when he was in college. For the brother who is 22, it was when he was in high school. They thought their life would always be like that. Just winning.
• I feel like I’m winning at life right now. I’ve been on a huge winning streak. I’ve gotten everything I wanted out of college. But… I don’t know how long you can keep a winning streak. Maybe too depressing of a thought for this climb
• Three miles left, 681 feet of elevation. And there will be a part 2 of the climb as well
• Very grateful I get to bike into the sunset at least
• I wonder who is reading my blogs. How much do they know about me? Do they know all these things I am thinking a lot? There are definitely a few people in my life that always know what I’m thinking about. It is very lucky to be known in that way.
• Another thing from the book that stood out to me. At the end of the dinner, they got into a huge argument. The younger brother told the older one that he hated him, that he always hated him. The older brother sighed and replied that he knows. Then the younger one stood up from the table and walked out of the restaurant
• The reason Ivan (the younger one) hated him was because he never thought of Ivan as an equal. When do you start thinking of your younger sibling as an equal? Maybe after college? When my brother is working a job, and I’m still jobless in grad school? I can’t believe that one day he’ll be earning more money than me. I guess he already is. I’m earning nothing this summer and it’s his first summer earning money
• Should I finish my emergency bike Pop Tart by the end of this climb? Every time I eat a Pop Tart now, I think of what Nate said, that he can’t imagine eating this as like a normal person for breakfast, just uncooked flour and icing. Seventy grams of carbs. It only makes sense in the context of biking and needing an insane amount of carbs
• Looking back to check for Tatiana as I’ve done 10 times
• Feeling like a snail today. Or turtle, slow and steady or whatever. I’m not feeling any motivation or incentive to go fast
• I wonder where these motorcyclists are going. I wonder how hard it is to drive a motorcycle. I think I would be competent enough to do it, I would just be a coward probably be competent enough to do it
• It is going to be 100+ degrees tomorrow…
• Out of the blue I’ve really been dreaming about going to the beach. And eating Chipotle, after Nate brought the fact that Chipotle exists back into my consciousness today. Oh god how I’ve missed Chipotle

• I never mentioned it in the blogs but I was vegetarian since I was 10, until this summer
• Thinking about where I should take my next butt break on this climb. Can I make it to those far away telephone poles?

Tatiana caught up to me at this point, giving me another teammate feature on the thoughts blog! Again unfortunately only my audio got picked up in the voice memo, so I will try to infer what happened in this conversation that has now taken place over a month ago…

• Tatiana is thinking about Wai and Aina, the farm in Kauai that we worked on together during IAP of our junior year. One of her friends that she recommended it to is there right now on a post-grad trip!
• I was thinking about Isaac the other day, one of the people who was working on the farm when we were there. Tatiana said he started some job in Washington or something? Can’t really hear the rest of what she said
• Tatiana left her emergency bike Pop Tart at the rest stop and was feeling extremely sad about it. She tried to wave Nate (driver) down as he drove past her but I told her it probably just looked like she was waving him hi. Good thing I still had half of mine to share
• I can’t believe nobody else on the team stops on their climbs. Tatiana and I both looove taking breaks on the climb
• Tatiana asked me a bit about the logistics of my Thoughts Blog plan, like when I choose to start and stop the voice memos and what I choose to record and stuff. It’s been an interesting experience to just talk to myself all day
• I love dribbling water all over my mouth because my mouth is so dry
• Can’t even enjoy this nice downhill separating part 1 and part 2 of the climb because part 2 of the climb is just climbing everything we will fly down
• I have black stuff in my water bottle. This dirty life is nice, but it’s kind of getting old. I’m excited to live a clean life. After Spokes.
• Second night in a row without laundry where we’re staying. Definitely need to hand-wash my bib
• Hopefully at least the stars will be pretty camping tonight
• How does this random stuff get here on the side of the highway? Like these random tire scraps?
• I asked Tatiana about her views on swearing, because I was thinking about all the expletives in our conversation I will have to remove for this blog. She thinks it’s funny sometimes, and it’s a way to creatively express strong emotions, but sometimes it’s definitely unnecessarily vulgar. It’s so interesting how we’ve decided some words are bad words. We need words to express high levels of strong emotion, which probably evolved into some words being really rude. I guess it’s similar to how we also don’t say the words “I love you” flippantly, either.
• I asked Tatiana if she’s ever hated anyone. She said no. She said that she’s really disliked people, but never hated
• Tatiana was thinking about what we are going to do all of our pads. Nunu bought an absurd number of pads at the start of the summer for the five girls on the trip: NINE boxes. She planned for almost a box per period. Very conservative calculations. We’ve used maybe a fifth of them, and we have a week left of Spokes
• This is not even mentioning all the tampons we have, since pads actually exponentially increase chafing while biking. My accomplishment of the summer is getting pretty good at tampons. In, out. No big deal
• I’ve been thinking about all the words I have to describe this summer. Tampon Summer, Venmo Summer (Tatiana didn’t have Apple Pay all summer so I’d pay and she’d Venmo. Balance has never been this big), Cheez-Its Summer (the one day 1 snack nobody on the team has gotten tired of), Iced Tea Summer, Chopped Summer for sure, Water Summer, Sunblock Summer (Tatiana says she’s never applied sunblock this religiously in her life, which is crazy because she’s insanely white. Apparently she just gets burned all the time). A lot of unique things this summer that I’ll never experience again. Sleeping On the Floor on Sleeping Pads Summer. Butt Sores Summer. Headwind Summer.
• Some screaming from both of us going up (or down?) the hill
• We both keep thinking about exiting this chopped era after Spokes. I’ve been thinking about my big hair chop. Tatiana’s excited to get her legs waxed and nails done. Any color but pink, she says, because her nails are already pink
• I’ve been thinking about the insane night out I’m going to have once I’m finally unchopped and in NYC. Once I was calling my friend Emily and it was pride in NYC and every single one of my friends was there. I asked her what the weekend plans were and it was hang out hang out go out go out hang out hang out… that should have been my life. Not climbing up some mountain in Nevada
• But we both did agree that although wildly different than the usual hanging out / going out we default to on a free day, we really are equally happy getting to experience the country with our Spokes lifestyle, which made me think about this admittedly corny Tumblr post I once saw on Instagram
  • “an author i love just tweeted about how ‘big joy and small joy are the same’ and how she was just as content the other night eating chocolate and cuddling her dog as she was on her Big Trip to new york and honestly. i think that’s it. this morning i was listening to an audiobook while baking shortbread in my joggers and i realised i didn’t care what Big Things happened in my future as long as i could keep baking and reading at the weekend and maybe that is the kind of bar we have to set to guard ourselves against disappointment. just appreciate and cherish the mundane stuff and see everything else as a bonus.”
• We stopped for a butt break and I thought about how one day, very soon, I will never have to get on a saddle again. And one day, I will be eating real food again. I can’t believe we eat one meal a day (dinner)
• Tatiana was about to ask Nate to drive back because she had less than half a bottle of water left, which turned into a long discussion about how little sense that made and how to optimize the rest of our joint water supply by, for example, putting the ice she has left in her uninsulated plastic bottle so it melts
• Thinking about The Lorax. Good movie
• I asked her what is the movie she has watched the most, which is Now You See Me, which happens to also be her favorite movie. She likes it because it has puzzles, and she likes puzzles, to which I replied that sometimes she says things and I think wow, that’s something a little kid would say. She told me that despite being friends for four years, she only recently found out that it’s one of her best friends Ava’s favorite movie too. She gave Ava five options of things they could do for Ava’s birthday, and selfishly slipped in watching Now You See Me 3 as one of them because she really wanted to go see its premiere, which is the option that Ava very enthusiastically picked, which is how she found this out. It’s a good movie, sure, but favorite movie is kind of insane
• The four guys on the two hour podcast on Pulp Fiction I listened to yesterday were talking about how Pulp Fiction was their all-time movie, like they can remember the first time they watched it and thought, “Holy sh**. This is my favorite movie.” Which launched us into a conversation about favorites and how we decide them, a phenomenon I’ve thought about a lot but never have been able to describe until Tatiana said it perfectly. Favorites are like something you slowly unlock as you grow older and experience more of the things of the world. Like your first unlock is something easy, like color. Tatiana’s latest unlock is artist: she saw a Monet exhibit and decided that now she has a favorite artist. (This led me to remember the time we played a trivia game at Easter and she panicked and said that The Starry Night was painted by Da Vinci or something and then her boyfriend and opponent Noah also panicked and said no it’s Picasso)
• When I first locked down my favorite color as red, it just felt right. Obviously I’ve technically had a favorite color for years: in the beginning I think it was yellow because my room is painted yellow and apparently I chose that at 5 years old; then for a long time it was blue, a very safe default; then in high school it was yellow and brown (this was the color scheme of these corny collages I made for my room and the blog website I had); then coming into college it was green. Then finally, junior fall, I locked in red. It was decided on the objective best day of my life to-date. I was in Maine on retreat for my floor (shoutout B1) when I saw my best friend Ria paddling on the lake behind the Airbnb in a bright red canoe and I thought Wow. Red is my favorite color. And then I wrote a poem about the color red for Prof. Joshua Bennett’s poetry workshop I was taking that semester. I don’t think I’ll change it ever again. Blue and yellow never felt as right as red does
• Tatiana has a favorite tree, the crepe myrtle. She chose it in high school
• I like that I have a favorite poem, From Blossoms by Li-Young Lee (Tatiana also agreed that she liked that I had a favorite poem). I read it in that same poetry class, and I read it aloud to the team once as we bit into the juiciest peaches I’d ever had from a peach stand on the side of the road, pitstopping into our ride through Palisade, CO, because I felt that we were experiencing in that moment exactly what he was talking about in this poem. It’s like he wrote that poem about our day.
• I really enjoyed going to the theater to watch The Odyssey. It made me feel like this is our small hometown, walking in sweats to the local movie theater, just five old friends. Tatiana’s parents are actually watching it at this very moment. It’s such an epic movie; it really deserves to be seen in theaters. Drew was saying that it’s even better on IMAX. It’s crazy that Drew’s read The Odyssey. I was telling him about some Percy Jackson plotline and he told me if it’s not Homer he doesn’t know what I’m talking about. He’s so well read, our Drew
• It’s crazy how much BS we can talk. If you kept Tatiana and I together we could just keep talking forever probably. Which is why we’re best friends, I guess
• Why am I lowkey getting really into burgers? I’ve really liked all the burgers we’ve had. We’re probably going to have another burger tonight, and I’m not mad about it. I’m sick of all our snacks and lunch sandwiches and even slightly sick of Mexican food, but not of burgers. Tatiana’s liked most of the burgers too, but she wouldn’t say she’s looking for another one. She wants a dish with rice, but what kind of dish with rice would we be getting at the ONE restaurant in Austin, Nevada?? Sure, in an ideal world I would love to be eating some chaat on the streets of Bombay right now, but… I’m in Austin, Nevada. This led us to start talking about all the food we wish we could have, including shrimp, Chipotle, Sweetgreen, ramen, and sushi
• Why did they decide to put the city AFTER this huge hill? Eureka, NV was also right after a big climb. If Nevada was populated westward, wouldn’t it make more sense to set up camp and put the city before the big hill? Tatiana offered maybe it was to protect from invaders, which doesn’t really make sense but okay
• The mountains all around us are so barren. It’s just brown. Pure dirt. Apparently we are in a national forest though; not sure what kind of forest has no trees
• I still think about how I biked out of Zion in 107 degree heat with a fever. It was probably the worst I’ve ever felt on a ride. Biking into Kansas City will always remain a top contender for worst biking day ever, but at least I didn’t think I was going to throw up every five minutes. It was really sweet how supported I felt that day though. Drew kept making comments and jokes about how fast I was going (Chuggasaurus Rex), Nate kept asking if I was okay because I was breathing so hard, Nunu was also making sure I was good. Since Tatiana was the driver that day, I was the slowest, so I was in charge of setting pace to make sure we all stuck together in the dangerously high heat. We were biking sooooo fast, mainly because I didn’t want to slow everyone down out of my own ego. At some point I literally thought I needed to stop to throw up on the side of the road, but I felt like I couldn’t stop because everybody was behind me. Peer pressure is a magnificent thing
• Right now I don’t feel any pressure, and what’s happening is that we’re taking five minute rest stops on the side of the road. Tatiana is really not into the peer pressure. She’s totally fine just doing her own thing; biking alone is better than feeling like she’s slowing someone down or stressing about whether she’s keeping up. I agree with her, especially if I’m listening to audiobooks or something it doesn’t really matter that someone isn’t biking alongside me

• Nate once said that if he crossed the whole country and didn’t feel like he pushed himself, he would not feel accomplished. On the other hand we both admitted that neither of us have really been pushing ourselves (“it’s not like we’re racing the Tour de France or something”) but we still feel accomplished as hell…
• I’ve never before in my life felt that I HAVE to eat, like even if I don’t feel like eating, I just need to eat for sustenance. Usually this is a perfect scenario (crazy cardio + no appetite), but I’ve heard bonking (running out of glycogen reserves) is the deadliest sin of biking and worth avoiding at all costs, so… Tatiana said she can’t think too hard about the fact that she’s eaten four slices of cake today, including for breakfast. I told her as driver to please get some NEW snacks tomorrow for our century of death (I just cannot understand why we buy the same snacks every single day) and that I would give my left kidney for some fruit for breakfast instead of another Nature Valley bar. She offered we could always go back to eating sandwiches instead of snacks all day. Yes, the sandwich made from bread that has been smushed around in the car, smeared with mayo that has been in our barely-cool cooler for seven weeks and a slice of cheese wet from the melted ice that seeps into the cheese pack, topped off by sticking our fingers in some pickled onion jar. Then eat it on the side of Highway 50 in 100 degree heat..
• We realized how quickly our conversation had divulged into a complaining fest
• Which wasn’t helped by the realization that tonight’s campsite only has cold showers. The lady in charge told me they have one tank of hot water for the entire campsite
• Tatiana thinks of climbs in terms of 0.1 miles, a unit she can complete in less than a minute. Ten miles is 100 of those, so she can count each percent going by, which is a comforting thought for her. I thought the exact opposite, that counting each 0.1 is so agonizing, that thinking about doing 100 of anything sounds so horrible. It’s interesting the different mental tricks everybody on the team uses to get through their toughest moments
• We discussed who we thought the strongest soldier on our team was. Tatiana immediately said Carmen, citing “have you ever seen her complain a single time?” I thought it was Nate, because I can’t believe he went back and finished the ride the day we SAG-ed because of the wildfire. If you really think about it though, all five of them are pretty strong soldiers, pushing through dog bites and rock slides and insane chafing. Everyone except for Nate and Carmen have been in accidents/injuries bad enough to get in the car. Nate did cut his foot though, which is actually pretty bad but he never makes a big deal of it
• Tatiana said she would try to get me new reflectors for my tire. I’ve never noticed the reflectors actually making a difference on anyone’s tires
• More talk about the food we want to eat post-Spokes. I said an iced Nola from Blue Bottle; Tatiana said a sea salt shaker from Cicada (spoiler: I went to Cicada literally first thing in the morning on my first full day back in Cambridge)
• More talk about all the semi-trucks going by, how boring the job of a driver must be, how little they get to see their family, how they’re sacrificing being with their family to make ends meet for their family
• Tatiana asked if my parents had ever talked to me about their paychecks. I said no. She said once, when the government shut down, she had asked what that meant and her mom told her she wouldn’t get her paycheck (she works at NASA). Not in an this-affects-us way, more in an explaining way. It’s one of our biggest privileges, to grow up never thinking about paychecks. Only during the summer we lived together in Boston and I was making a UROP salary (minimum wage doing research) did I understand what it meant to live paycheck to paycheck, to think about when your rent is due in relation to when you are getting paid
• An Amazon Prime truck passed us. What an insane concept, to order literally anything in the world and have it delivered to your doorstep same day. And what an insane scheduler algorithm they must use
• In a similar vein, the other day I voiced how insane it is that airports work so seamlessly, and Drew agreed that it was something he too often thought about it, and he told me about the time his dad who works at FedEx took him to the Memphis airport and he witnessed how FedEx works. Every day, every single package that needs to be overnight shipped goes to Memphis. And every night, from 1 AM to 4 AM, they sort out every single package at the Memphis airport, and send them on hundreds of planes all over the world. Even from the middle of nowhere Nevada, there’s probably a truck that can go down Highway 50 in a few hours, collect every piece of mail that needs to be shipped, and head to the nearest major airport, like Reno. It’s the kind of massive logistical problem that we never think about but someone has solved; someone did the math to check that it’s in some way more efficient to ship everything to Memphis to sort than to try to cut down on plane costs, and that Memphis makes the most sense geographically based on their package distribution. It’s not the most obvious solution
• This reminded me of the consulting casing problems she told me she did while interview-prepping, which reminded me that her boyfriend Noah is going through the same consulting interview process right now, which made me think about how insane it would be if they became a Bain couple. (I’m realizing that apparently I think about how insane/crazy things are a lot, or at least I’ve written that phrase many times throughout this blog). I asked her how much PDA she would show at work. Probably just hugs, she said
• I asked what were her thoughts on workplace romances. She prefers it over meeting online or something, because you already have like some shared background and values, similar financial situations and status, etc. There was a study done on how the distribution of places people meet their significant other is changing, and surprisingly, the biggest category to drop was at the office. I thought maybe it was because of the rise of remote work, but Tatiana said it was because of the increasing power of HR offices in the workforce. She is super pro meeting your S.O. at hobbies, which led us to surmise how great it is to meet your S.O. through something like Spokes (shoutout Greta and Charles) or the Hawaii farm. It makes her really happy that this farm experience she holds so dear to her heart was something she was able to share with her boyfriend Noah, who worked there this past IAP!
• Sometimes I think of Cleo, the Spokes 2024 member who couldn’t finish the trip after breaking her arm skidding off the road, two weeks shy of the end of the trip
• I asked Tatiana if she thinks she’ll be addicted to sugar by the end of this. Yes, but with how excited she is to eat healthy again and by being at home, she doesn’t think it’ll last long. We are both so glad our parents never let us have soda as kids so that even today I never feel like having more than a few sips. The only time we’ll get soda is the occasional Coke to split with pizza, a nostalgic combo for my dad. We’re also so grateful our parents never got us an iPad and limited our TV time as kids. I remember I only started watching TV in high school. My gateway show was Supergirl (I had to watch it for a language arts assignment or something at the end of 8th grade); Tatiana’s was Grey’s Anatomy

We finally made it to the top of our 2000 ft climb, feeling light and happy from all our interesting conversation, where a truly breathtaking sunset awaited us. We spent some time deciding our order to send to our teammates who were already at the one restaurant in Austin, NV (shoutout Grandma’s), and then my phone promptly died. Perfect timing, because the last two miles were straight downhill into town, no voice memos needed.

We were greeted by our most abysmal campsite yet. By campsite, I am referring to a small patch of concrete in the midst of trailers that seemed like many of the coal town’s residents lived full-time in. After getting yelled at by our neighbor for taking up too much space, we compacted all our stuff onto the tarp that we were going to put our sleeping bags on, not even bothering to setup tents. Drew, Caroline, Carmen, and Nunu were still at Grandma’s waiting on our pizzas. Nate and Tatiana were on the phone. I was outside the only shower of the campsite waiting for twenty minutes. After I finally showered, I texted Tatiana to start the shower line in hopes of keeping the bathroom colonized, and so that we could charge all our devices on the only electrical outlet of the campsite. I realized, however, that there were multiple people waiting for at least as long as I had, including the woman who yelled at us, so I took out our jungle gym of charging cables and uncolonized the shower. At this point, it was well past 9 PM and the Grandma’s gang had been waiting for two hours. Apparently there just was a single guy working there hand tossing each pizza one by one.

This situation all makes more sense when you realize that Austin, Nevada is considered a living ghost town with a population of 167. It’s technically not even a town but an unincorporated census-designated place, meaning that it has no local government or legal boundaries—it’s just a named collection of people living in proximity. Like many towns and former towns in Nevada, it was founded during the silver rush around the time of the Civil War. Settlers flocked, its population boomed, railroads were built to connect it with the transcontinental, and by the time the railroad finished, it was all over, and the city was disincorporated in 1881. The people still left are mostly miners and ex-miners.

I was about to hit the hay when at 10 PM, Carmen, Caroline, Nunu, and Drew came back with the pizza and a proposition. To be honest, it was more of a decided plan than a proposition, but everyone had the decency to at least pretend that Tatiana and I had the liberty of making a decision to opt-in.

The proposition was to pack up camp, keep biking through the night as long as we could, sleep on the side of Highway 50 around 3 AM for two REM cycles, then finish the 114 mile ride into Fallon before the afternoon heat. Yes I am serious.

It sounded genuinely insane, like something only seriously crazy people would do. The rationale: there’s another wildfire near Austin, the wind and therefore the smoke blows much harder during the day, it’s going to be over 100 degrees tomorrow so we would anyway have to do a 4 AM wakeup, we won’t get much sleep here regardless, and this campsite is so abysmal that the side of the highway wouldn’t be that much worse. Okay sure.

We kicked into action. Tatiana, tomorrow’s driver, sped to the only gas station in Austin to pick up Red Bulls and an extra gluttonous assortment of drinks, 10 minutes till closing time (everyone is converted to Liquid Diet). Everyone else was still in their day’s biking gear, except me, who was showered in my cozy pajamas, and Nate, today’s driver. Nate got in line for the bathroom to change while Drew and Caroline held our tarp against the wall across from our campsite to create a makeshift shield I could change behind. Buttering my butt while changing into my used bib between a wall and tarp my two dear friends were holding up in a church x RV park x campsite in Austin, Nevada will remain one of the top 10 weirdest experiences of my life. We sped ate pizza and sped packed up the campsite and sped charged bike lights and sped filled water bottles. The true team feeling only comes in moments like these.

I’m going to only transcribe selected snippets of the thoughts of the next leg of biking because I’ve spent an insane amount of time and words on this blog already and nobody is even still reading this anyway. We got Nunu and Tatiana as thought guests on the blog and now we have the whole team all biking together!

• Lots of talking about how we feel like crazy people
• It’s kind of creepy how there’s absolutely no civilization around us until we reach our destination, and it’s completely pitch dark without our bike lights (most of Nevada is a Dark Sky Zone)
• Carmen’s Strava never paused so we are going to have an official record of this once in a lifetime 180 mile bike ride
• Because of how flat it is and how bright car headlights are, Nate can see cars so far in the distance behind us that he can’t tell when to call out so we can move off the highway. The first time we tested out this very cautious system, it took a full five minutes for the car to actually reach us. Super trippy
• Apparently we had been climbing for the last ten minutes but nobody could tell due to both the rush of adrenaline that comes with becoming a crazy person and the fact that we couldn’t see ten feet in front of us, so it was impossible to see the hill or the horizon. A surprising and very major benefit of riding in the dark. Perhaps we should be doing this every day. But what kind of host would let us just camp at their house and sleep all day
• We tried to figure out what the lights dancing in the distance were for a very long time before realizing they were probably the wildfire
• The night air was very cool, but we kept hitting strange pockets of hot air
• Each time a car was passing it was like playing a game of telephone, relaying the message “CAR INCOMING” to the people in front
• Nunu figured out why the night felt so young and fun: everything this summer had started to feel so routine, but biking through the night like this was genuinely such a novel experience, and our first novel experience in a long time. It’s like Spokesmaxxing
• We stargazed in pieces, stealing glances at the sky while trying not to fall off the bike
• Caroline introduced us to the world of hobby mountain biking, where you run around on trails holding handlebars attached to a front wheel. Like the people who play Quidditch running around with brooms between their legs…
• I have four consecutive rest days coming up (learning festival, driver, rest, rest), the most probably anyone has had all summer
• I complained about how extremely ready to hit the hay I was, all showered up, and Drew offered me his shoulder to sleep on while biking
• “WE GOT OURSELVES A NODDER!!!”
• I wish there was a huge TV in front of us so we could watch a movie while biking. They should put a projector screen between Drew and Caroline in front of me
• Oh! These pockets of hot air are probably from the wildfire
• The idea that maybe we won’t stop at the previously agreed upon min(Mile 45, 2 AM) was soft-launched…
• Carmen is doing her Duolingo WHILE biking so that she doesn’t lose her insane 1000+ day streak

• Nunu feels like we’re in a simulation, like we’re on a stationary bike in the dark in some kind of 4D theater, where they’re injecting smoke! cold air! hot air! car! effects at us. Garmin beeps climb complete = they turned the climb effect off
• Nunu apparently can’t tell Nate and I apart on the bike, to which we both feel offended but for different reasons (he keeps repeating “I’m nearly 6 feet tall”)
• Jokes about stranding team members in the desert. Desert divorce is the new alpine divorce.
• “WE GOT OURSELVES A NODDER!!!” So good we needed to reference it twice
• Nunu kept riding on the right lane line of the highway that is purposefully super bumpy so that it alerts you that you’re driving into the shoulder. She said it made her feel like she’s in Subway Surfers, collecting toys and running from the police
• I said I didn’t want to delete these voice memos even after I’m done writing for the sake of having memories. Everybody said I’m just filling my phone storage up with garbage. But secretly I’m filling my phone up with blackmail. I told everyone to say something racist. Drew said, “My name is Aarushi Mehrotra and I’m going to say the N word now”
• We all felt very inspired by Stanford Spokes who had literally just finished their one 200 mile ride of the summer, and it only took them 20 hours!! I came back to this thought many times to keep me going. It’s so cute how I still feel connected to them, thousands of miles east of us
• Maybe the place we’re staying at (a youth club / rec center) will have a comfy couch. Maybe they will have laundry. Maybe they will have a king bed. Maybe they will have a king bed all for me…
• Surely the truck drivers passing by us aren’t sleepy right… surely there is a legal limit on how many hours a day they can drive…
• Lots of complaining about the state of our saddle-bound butts. I wish I could have like five butts of cushion attached to my butt
• We fall in and out of formation so swiftly. CAR BACK! We all immediately line up single file on the very rightmost edge of the soldier. Car passes. We all disperse in an amorphous blob, our bright front white and rear red lights flashing like a lights show, a constellation
• Carmen is still wearing her leg sun sleeves, even in the dead of night
• We faintly see the wildfire in the distance
• Planning out at which rest stops to drink our Red Bulls
• Discussion on how we would each approach the 6/12/18/24 challenge
• I’m excited to listen to The Mark of Athena at midnight and quit this blog. I know all my readers will be so sad. They wish they could hear my thoughts for five more hours
• And many more thoughts that I’m missing because instead of listening to the entire voice memo I’m just selecting which parts were automatically transcribed correctly, which is maybe 5% because the other 95% is just noise pollution

Finally, we see the glorious headlights of our car Mr. K on the side of the road. At our first rest stop of the night, the clock struck midnight…. and Day 68 began. I’ll let Caroline take it from here.

Okay that’s fourteen thousand words of thoughts. If you made it this far, here is a big kiss on the cheek 😘

Thank you even more than always for reading,

Aarushi

PS: This is 328 minutes = 5.5 hours of voice memo footage.