MIT Spokes 2026

Author: MIT Spokes

  • Day 72: GET OFF THE BEACH! THE BEAR IS COMING!

    Day 72: GET OFF THE BEACH! THE BEAR IS COMING!

    Rest Day in South Lake Tahoe — 0 mi, 0 ft

    Today was an exceedingly rare morning in which the team was slow to get ready and out the door. I’ll go ahead and type out another line so you can read the sarcasm between the lines. 

    As of 11am, I had just woken up. When I walked out, I found Aarushi and Carmen in the hot tub – Drew joined them shortly. Caroline was diligently working on posting blogs. Nunu had also recently woken up and was lounging about. Tatiana was somewhere in the city getting her legs waxed. 

    As of 12:30pm, Tatiana had returned, and she and Drew swapped places with Tatiana joining in the hot tub while Drew went to grab a burger from Five Guys. Meanwhile, the rest of the team made themselves avocado toast, while Nunu and I attempted to make an itinerary for the day. We repeatedly had to push the “leave the house” part of our itinerary back as we watched the day slip away from us. 

    The difficulty of itinerary making stemmed from the fact that Drew had blown out his back tire two days prior on the ride into Tahoe and needed it to be replaced. We had originally thought there was a Trek store in North Lake Tahoe, where we wanted to go spend the day at a beach and hiking, but it turns out Drew had discovered a non-existent Trek store and, instead, the store was in Reno. 

    We ended up scrapping the hiking part of the itinerary to make time for repairing Drew’s bike, and decided to leave at 2pm towards the beach, have Drew drop everyone off and go fix the bike, and then meet us back at the beach after the ~1 hour drive both ways to Reno. By the time he got back at 5pm, we would head back and make an end-of-spokes/last-rest-day dinner, then sleep for our very climby 100 mile ride out of the Sierras tomorrow. 

    We received several eye rolls when we declared that we needed to leave at 2pm, in 30 minutes, since people didn’t think it would happen – which, to this day writing this blog after spokes has ended, I’m still not sure why this was thought as a herculean task since it was more than enough time. But as they say, “Fool me 287 times throughout the summer, shame on me”, because at 2pm only half the team was ready, Drew walked in with his burger in hand, and Tatiana walked out of the bathroom looking about the same as she did 30 minutes ago. 

    In any case, we eventually made it out the door, but not before Aarushi ran back inside to grab her headphones to listen to her 7 hours of audio messages to herself for her blog from the 200 mile ride a few days ago. Throughout the ride, much of the car was focused on catching up on blogs, including a particularly egregious Tatiana who was trying to avoid DOUBLE lapping (e.g. her next blog day was tomorrow, and she hadn’t finished her blog from 2 weeks ago). 

    Driving to the beach took a bit under an hour, and we arrived at a boat ramp area that strictly stated “No Drop Off”. Well no matter, we’ve ignored much more threatening signs before and decided we would loop back around, quickly get out of the car, and have Drew drive off. Unfortunately, “quick” is not in the vocabulary of much of our team so half of us got out quickly while the other half was still packing up their stuff in the car, so Drew drove off to do another loop with half the team after a big boat pulled up behind us. 

    On the third loop, the rest of the team got out but Caroline forgot her sketch/drawing bag in the car, so she ran after Drew to get her stuff from the car. Unfortunately, by this point we had exhausted all of our allotted stealth and had caught the attention of some park rangers who proceeded to interrogate Caroline as she grabbed her bag out of the car:

    • Park Ranger (PR): “Hey, you can’t get dropped off here! Tell him [Drew] he can’t drive away!” 
    • Drew hears this, and drives away.
    • PR: “You have to get back in that car!”
    • Caroline (C): “I can’t…” (The car had driven away). 
    • PR: “Who was that?”
    • C: “One of my friends dropping off some stuff for me”
    • PR: “Where did you come from then? How did you get into the beach?”
    • C: “I walked in from the trail”

    There might’ve been some more back and forth but in the end Caroline just walked away while the ranger furiously radio’d people over their walkie-talkie. When Caroline met up with us, she quickly changed into her swim suit to avoid being recognizable, and then we continued peacefully with our beach day. 

    The Lake Tahoe beach day commences.

    By now it was ~3:15pm, and the others got ready for beach activities while I went on a run down a super pretty bike trail that ran alongside the lake. 

    Pictures from the trail I ran along the lake.

    When I got back, everyone was gone, so I grabbed some snacks and went looking for them. I found most of them jumping off some rocks in the distance, and Nunu much closer when she jumped out from behind a bush to try to scare me – not much luck there. 

    She had been walking back to where our stuff was to grab our floatie when she spotted me, so we walked back to inflate the floatie. Nunu had come up with the brilliant idea that we should swim the floatie around a cove of rocks to bring it to the rest of the team, instead of just walking 3 minutes with it. She managed to rope Tatiana into the idea as well, but the floatie only made it about 10 feet off the shore before the three of us gave up and walked it over. 

    We walked over to where Carmen, Aarushi, and Carmen were sitting on a rock, dropped the floatie in the water, and began paddling it towards some deeper water. Some yelling immediately ensued about “bring the floatie over here [to the rocks]”, “just come swim to the floatie”, “I don’t want to swim to the floatie”, “just swim”, “the water is cold”, “you’ll get wet either way”, “why didn’t you guys wait for us to come down from the rocks”, and some other chaos like that. 

    All this yelling was interfering with my relaxation, so I decided to swim off and go lay on some rocks where I could listen to the calm crashing of waves instead of the loud crashing out of teammates. 

    At this point time started to dilate since I was going in and out of micronaps and I didn’t have my phone on me to check the time (it was back with all our stuff, this will be important shortly). 

    At various intervals of ~30 minutes I briefly checked on the status of the team. First I saw the floatie wasn’t in the water anymore, but I saw the team walking off in the distance. A bit later, Nunu found me while I was peering up from my rocks and joined in some rock laying. Again a bit later, we checked again from a distance, since at this point we had been at the beach for a while, but saw that all of our stuff was still all over the place, the floatie laying fully inflated, and Caroline appearing to be drawing on our picnic blanket. Clearly, no plans on leaving any time soon, back to the rocks we go. 

    After maybe 20 minutes lying down (again, neither of us had phones so we don’t really know, but it felt like 20 minutes), we checked again from a distance. All of our stuff is gone. Uh oh…

    We walked back to where our stuff was and sure enough, it’s all gone: our phones, shoes, clothes, snacks, etc. I looked around in the sand expecting some sort of message written out for us or a hole hidden by leaves with our phones in it so we could communicate with them, but no such luck. 

    We walked around the beach aimlessly for a while, not sure if they left us to get groceries and would come back to pick us up, if they forgot about us, or maybe were enacting some cruel punishment on us for not checking in with them sooner. We asked some other beach goers to use their phones, but like most modern Zoomers we don’t know any of our friends’ phone numbers, so we just tried calling our own phones hoping that the team would hear them buzzing. After a few calls, we gave up and went back to aimless walking, hoping the team would show up out of nowhere to save us from desolation. 

    It’s quite surprising how immediately helpless you feel without your phone: we couldn’t call an Uber, couldn’t get directions home, couldn’t call to see where everyone was, couldn’t get a pizza delivered to our location. Yep, at this point, hunger was setting in and it was becoming clear that we only had a few hours left before we would have to resort to cannibalism. Either way, with no water, we could probably only survive 1-2 more hours. 

    It was at this point that bad turned into worse. We look over to where our stuff was before and THERE WAS A BEAR. 

    Ok the cannibalism was a joke but this is serious, there was actually a bear like 10 feet away from us. To be honest, the worst part of this whole situation was I didn’t have my phone to take a picture of it for the blog. 

    We stood around with some other beach goers at a probably-not-that-safe distance watching as the bear slowly walked across the beach past us and up to a big dumpster looking for food. It jumped up and looked into it for a while, at which point I realized that Nunu was holding a bag of salt and vinegar potato chips… we’re done for…

    The bear must not have a very good sense of smell because eventually it gave up on the dumpster and just kept walking towards the other side of the beach. Or maybe it just doesn’t like vinegar chips, me neither. In hindsight, I don’t get why the beach had a bunch of bear-proof trash cans everywhere if they were just going to leave an open dumpster in the middle of the parking lot. 

    At this point, we went back to trying to find a way to contact the team – now with a bit more urgency. To do so, we had to keep walking in the direction that the bear had walked off towards though. Eventually, we found someone who let them use their phone, this time we planned to call Nunu’s mom who had Aarushi’s number. 

    But right as we were about to call her mom a park ranger started yelling, “GET OFF THE BEACH! THE BEAR IS COMING! THIS IS SERIOUS, GET OFF THE BEACH! GO! LEAVE YOUR STUFF! YOU NEED TO GO NOW!”. 

    This could not have been the best way to deal with this situation, surely inciting panic just causes more problems. Across today, the Sand Beach State Park Rangers definitely left a bit to be desired. 

    But anyways, we handed back the phone and walked off (calmly) away from the yelling park ranger towards the visitor center, still wondering what we were going to do. It was at this point that we spotted the iconic orange top bag in the distance. We ran towards our salvation, and ran into Caroline, who had apparently been walking up and down the beach asking if people had seen “a shirtless curly hair guy probably wearing a hat and a short Asian girl”.

    We hopped into the van and exchanged stories with the rest of the team. Apparently, they didn’t know that we didn’t have our phones and just packed everything up to meet Drew when he said he was arriving at the beach. 

    At this point, we headed back to continue our plan of cooking dinner for our last rest day. We stopped and picked up groceries, then headed home and everyone worked on cooking a delicious meal of burgers, baked potatoes, fruit, corn salad, and mac n’ cheese. 

    Everyone working hard on cooking. I, of course, was in charge of supervision and photography. Just kidding, I helped too, I swear.

    Drew, who was in charge of burgers, may have cooked them too well done on the grill outside and had to move to the pans on the stove. This, of course, naturally led him to throw the patties into a pan of hot oil and splash oil all over himself, giving himself second degree burns on his arms and legs. 

    Quick grocery run to replace the burned patties

    A picture of Drew’s burns the day after.

    Besides this, the cooking went pretty smoothly and we enjoyed a very yummy last dinner. 

    Not bad for one of two meals we ever cooked for ourselves this summer.

    Afterwards, Drew, Nunu, and I super quickly cleaned up all the dishes and kitchen and then we all went to bed for the first of our upcoming back-to-back century days. 

    – Nate

  • Day 71: Boat day

    Day 71: Boat day

    Rest Day in South Lake Tahoe, CA — 0 mi, 0 ft

    This was the day I looked forward to the most, more than any other on the entire trip. Boat day

    A little while back I heard whispers circulating throughout the team.

    A boat? In Tahoe?

    It was true, Nunu’s family booked us a rental boat in Tahoe. This was what motivated me to get out of Nevada. I endured some of the hardest days and nights of my life to get here. Going days and days without seeing a single body of water made the blue expanse feel alien when I laid eyes on the lake for the first time after climbing the sierras. 

    Again, I’m writing this blog after the trip ended, so my synopsis of the day is limited to the details that I can remember. 

    I remember when we left that morning, I was so happy that I didn’t even put up a fight when they asked to go to a coffee shop. I was in somewhat of a hurry, so I pulled some crazy maneuvers to get us through traffic fast. I went in to the coffee shop, looking for something. I hate on coffee shops, but I’ve since learned to adapt… by ordering whatever on the menu isn’t coffee. I was out of luck here though, there was nothing but coffee. 🙁.

    Anyways, we made our way to the lake, the guy at the rental place gave me and nate the run down, and we were off.

    We did some tubing, and wake boarding. Tatiana got up after only a few tries, as did Carmen. I took a bit longer though.

    Afterwords, the lake got too choppy too keep wakeboarding, so we went through Emerald Bay.

    Then we went swimming. The water was appropriately cold.

    They told us to be back by 3 pm. We were there exactly at 3, as to not waste any time. My favorite activity of the whole summer had concluded. We spent the rest of the day doing other stuff: playing volleyball, eating pizza, then going to sleep.

    This is my last blog of the summer. I learned that, if you really want to know someone well, bike across the country with them. These 6 are some of my favorite humans, and I am immensely grateful for everything they’ve done for me this summer. Nate gave me a draft. Tatiana gave me food. Carmen  fixed my bike. Caroline educated me on nature. Nunu gave me soda. Aarushi said funny stuff that made me laugh. After the Zion incident, everybody came together to make sure I’d be able to finish the trip. Thanks, guys.

    Signing off,

    Drew

  • Day 70: The Last Hurrah

    Day 70: The Last Hurrah

    Fallon, NV to South Lake Tahoe, CA — 101.4 mi, 5,750 ft

    Video script: So you know how only a couple of days ago we ended up doing that heinous 200 mile ride overnight that was definitely one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life? I remember at first having a huge adrenaline rush of “WOW we’re biking at night this is so fun” to then feeling so so so sleepy to then chugging caffeine and being insanely buzzed from that to then crashing again to then waking up and pooping behind a bush on the side of the highway feeling like I wanted to die. And I remember telling myself, it was all worth it because when else am I going to have an experience like this? I need to savor it. Turns out I would be having a very similar experience only a couple days later because today, we woke up at 1AM to (again) start our century bike ride in the middle of the night.

    This was of course Drew and Nate’s “geniusness” and I say that in quotes. The motivation behind this idea was to again, avoid peak afternoon winds and heat. To be honest, I don’t really get it because we’ve dealt with much worse winds and heat throughout the summer but maybe this overnight biking thing that we only recently discovered has set a trend for our last remaining bike days. And I’m not really one to argue I’m usually just fine with whatever the majority of the team wants to do and everyone surprisingly seemed down for this idea. So, as Carmen mentioned in the previous blog, to maximize our efficiency once we woke up, some of us were going to sleep in our bibs. Unfortunately, the only one of us to end up doing that was also the only one who definitely didn’t need to do that, our most efficient morning riser, Nate Mustafa. In the morning when we were all running around the Fallon Youth Club, Nate in his bib and the rest of us in PJs, aarushi pointed this out and I thought that it was just really funny.

    Puffy eyed and delirious, we all tried as quickly as possible to pack up all of our things that we had, just as usual, thrown all about. Once dressed and packed, we all gathered in FYC’s industrial kitchen to warm up our breakfast burritos in their industrial kitchen warmer machine and fill our water bottles to the brim with ice from the industrial ice machine.

    Now I have to tell you a story that I wish I had on film. For context, none of us are truly morning people meaning that at 1AM we were all not in the happiest moods. Aarushi, our driver of the day, had declared aloud that she wanted to eat only half of her muffin and asked if anyone else wanted her other half. No one responded but she left her other half on the kitchen counter and went to do other tasks. When she came back she found out that Nate had eaten the other half of her muffin and got very mad at him. We then all maybe ganged up on Aarushi a little bit and told her that there were many more muffins in the carton that she could eat but she wouldn’t have it because she wanted her half of the muffin. I told her that she was not a serious person. She then exclaimed very passionately, “I’M A SERIOUS PERSON!” To which Drew responded with a rap to ragebait her further. This rap has stuck with us ever since.

    Before we left, Caroline and I had to give a little upgrade to Mr. K. We placed Caroline’s elephant and Drew’s Max on our dashboard made from our design workshop and they are the cutest additions.

    Something interesting about biking at night is that you can switch out your sunglasses lens for a night mode one that supposedly makes things look brighter. That’s why Nate looks like an owl here.

    At 2:15 AM we were finally ready to go! Now the fun part about biking in the middle of the night is that there’s literally no one else awake but us. No cars to worry about running us over and it feels like the whole world is ours.

    When we got to the first stop, our amazing driver had our new liquid diet all set up and waiting for us. For some reason, this summer the girls on the team have developed an addiction to Arizona’s. Turns out they are also a great source of carbs that are much easier to consume compared to endless cheezits and gummy worms. Aarushi had gone and bought four or five gallons of different Arizona’s as well as sodas for the boys. We were so back. Caroline was also having some allergies so Aarushi got her a nasal spray that Drew fear-mongered she would get addicted to. We then caught Drew throwing away chunks of his poptart into the bushes because he doesn’t like eating the edges. We are just a very strange crew.

    As we kept biking, we eventually started to see the sunrise which, surprisingly, I’ve never been able to see all of yet this summer. The sky went from pitch black to suddenly pink and blue, the road was still empty, and I had my favorite people by my side and I remember feeling at peace.

    As we kept biking, we sped past a sign that read CAROLINE WAY! I immediately demanded that we all turn around so we could get a picture of Caroline with the sign. Something that may have already been mentioned in the blogs is that most of the team has nicknames that the rest of us like to stim, meaning that we like to repeat it over and over again because it’s fun. Carmen is Bacon. Bacon Bacon Bacon. And Caroline is Care-O-lineee. Bacon and Caroline is Bacoline. And aarushi is arshi arshi arshi. Drew is D-rew but we don’t really tend to stim that one. Tatiana, Nate and I are boring. Anyway we derive a lot of pleasure from doing this for some reason. On that 200 mile overnight ride, repeating Bacoline over and over again was the only thing that kept me entertained.

    At some point, I turned around and realized Nate had replaced his night mode lens for literally nothing. He explained that he wanted to enjoy the sunrise in its true colors but keep using his rearview mirror so he just looked kind of funny.

    63 miles in and at around 8AM we arrived at the fourth rest stop, a coffee shop in Carson City! As we biked in we all talked about how nice the area looked and how cute the shops were but everything was thankfully still closed because otherwise our very easily distracted group would lose all of the time we tried to save by biking through the night. We all got some drinks and sat in the coffee shop’s courtyard. I got a very delicious Thai Iced Tea Latte combination that Aarushi tried some of and decided her first coffee wasn’t enough and she needed to get this second one too. Afterwards, we decided we would do just the tiniest bit of sidequesting by going to a flea market that we saw was nearby on Google Maps. Once we got there, we found only an empty parking lot. We decided to continue on to visit the State Capital Building and wandered around the outside. Soon enough we decided to continue and meet up with Drew who was waiting at the nearby Wendy’s along the route. At this Wendy’s we each ended up ordering their homestyle seasoned potatoes which were basically these really delicious glorified fries.

    Now, the big event of the day was this 2,000 ft climb up to South Lake Tahoe from Carson City. As we were just approaching these huge mountains, Drew’s tire popped! We had maybe our 100th tire puncture of the trip. After test riding for a bit we decided to keep biking toward the next rest stop that was right before the big climb and we could try to repair it there. This rest stop was at a nice park where we pulled out our sandwiches that FYC gave us while Drew and Nate continued their bike repair work. Here’s some funny videos of Drew biking back and forth on the street to see if their plug worked.

    We ended up spending probably a lot of time at this rest stop trying to delay the inevitable climb. Drew and Nate left first before Aarushi could give us her motivational and completely original speech. The climb itself was honestly not that bad, but maybe because I was expecting the worst. I was also bike computer-less today since Aarushi’s was broken so by the time I thought I was only a mile in, I was actually like 3 miles in and the whole thing went by much faster than I expected. Aarushi was driving back and forth up this mountain to check on all of the bikers and to do a makeshift rest stop mid-climb for Tatiana who specifically requested it. By the time I reached the summit I realized no one was there and decided to keep biking down. This downhill was so so fun, barely peddling as I just shifted my weight to go around the twists and turns. Eventually, I made it to South Lake Tahoe! As I was biking down highway 50, the main road that goes through the area, I looked up to see the California border crossing sign and felt a surprising mix of emotions. I was just thinking about how it is actually so insane I started in Washington D.C., a place so so far away from home, and ended up all the way in California, my home state! It was unbelievable. I felt so proud and happy and confused and grateful. The second I crossed the border I actually felt so at home. I’ve actually grown up coming to Lake Tahoe at least once every year so I am pretty familiar with the area. The trees were so green and the lake was so blue and I was just so happy.

    I met up with Nate and Drew who were at Jamba Juice and we waited for everyone else to come down the mountain so we could get a group photo together at the border. Because we had so much time to kill, we decided to try and look at the beach. Unfortunately, the beach we ended up next to required an entrance fee so we just stared longingly at the sparkly blue lake through the tall fence. We met up with Carmen and Caroline and all waited together next to the border crossing sign for Aarushi and Tatiana. Soon, they came and we biked a bit more to find a fancier border crossing sign that I had found online because the one on highway 50 was kind of lame and hard to take photos next to. Unluckily for us, the sign was on a trail that was for some reason closed off or under construction. We decided to do as we usually do and pretend that these signs don’t pertain to cyclists, only to pedestrians and cars. We then took maybe five hundred silly photos of ourselves because you only really bike across the country into California once.

    Now, the rest of the day I guess I just forgot to film any part of it but it’s okay because nothing really interesting happened. We ended up biking the last 8 miles to our airbnb kindly donated to us by my awesome parents. We settled down and everyone proceeded to immediately take showers and fall asleep since I guess we didn’t really sleep the night before. Sometime around 10PM I went to pick up Chipotle for everyone which some people woke up for but others ended up just eating for breakfast the next morning.

    Because I love Lake Tahoe, I convinced the whole team a couple of weeks ago to turn our singular rest day into two rest days so I’m really really looking forward to all the fun things that we will do as our last hurrah of the summer.

  • Day 69: just a biker gang of irresponsible youths

    Day 69: just a biker gang of irresponsible youths

    Learning Festival in Fallon, NV — 0 mi, 0 ft

    Last morning, we woke up in a ditch on the side of highway 50, wearing unwashed day-old bibs, jerseys with an extra layer of funk pressed into the already stained nylon, and I had the privilege of squirting eye drops on contacts so dry they were peeling off my eyeballs.

    This morning, we woke up in an air conditioned room with a carpeted floor, a ceiling, wearing normal clothes, and I to blurry vision. What an incredible thing it is to have a roof over your head.

    When I say we, I mean it in the general sense. In reality, we were all scattered to the wind, sleeping in so many random places throughout the Fallon Youth Club that when I fell asleep last night, I was the only person in the Learning Center we had littered with our stuff. Although this morning I found two more. It seems the Learning Center became the freshmen’s bedroom as Caroline was sprawled on the ottomans next to me, which had separated as she slept so she began to fall through the cracks like Pangea during continental drift, and Drew was splayed across the other longer ottoman, sleeping under (not in) Caroline’s sleeping bag. I was on the floor using one of the communal blankets as a pillow, which combined with Drew’s theft, apparently robbed Caroline of anything warm to sleep with and so we found her under the picnic blanket that desperately needed to be washed. I’m so sorry.

    It was quite nice to stay in the same place as our learning festival. Combined with it being our very last one, it seemed like everyone was slightly less stressed than usual.

    What added to this luxury were the hand delivered breakfast in takeout boxes from our LF hosts. All of us gathered around to reveal the treasure that was pancakes, bacon, eggs, and hashbrowns.

    In what has become our pre-LF tradition, the coffee drinkers (everyone except the guys) went to get lattes at this log cabin cafe. The sizes were hugee and Aarushi and I decided to split a 32 oz iced latte (which was only $8.50, just saying). Caroline, Nunu, and Tatiana got their own fancy drinks in a smaller size and ended up paying ~$10, so really who won?

    We all got back to FYC and started setting up for the last learning festival of the trip. Just as Aarushi and I were discussing how we could go about doing the chemistry workshop with even the littlest kids, Tatiana came in with the news that the LF might not even happen. Today was mandatory school supply pick up day, and all but four of the kids who had signed up have called in to cancel. Only one kid had arrived. And so this might turn into a day of teaching to only one single kid.

    Aarushi offered that we teach him first, out of the pure goodness of her heart, but also, just maybe, so we could be done with the day before it had even started.

    Tatiana offered to join the kid so he’s not alone, and then we managed to rope Caroline and Nunu into it as well. Caroline was a wonderful student, answering all of our questions to the best of her ability. Nunu was horribly distracting, somehow worse than any other elementary schooler, old enough to have the audacity to ask for a latex glove in the middle of the lesson to make balloons with.

    Aarushi took over the task of debriefing the experiment to the kid, a slightly long but rewarding task since after several back and forth questions, she was able to help him understand what chemical does what and which you’d need to add to get what effect.

    That was our last time teaching the chemistry workshop. Sigh. Well as a reward we had a couple hours of break, until more kids were going to show up for our next workshop at 2. The school supply pick-up was only in the morning, so it meant a few more kids would show up at lunch. It was starting to look more like a festival and less like a one man show. Caroline, Nunu, and Tatiana would teach them in the meantime. Drew and Nate were still out at the laundromat, gallantly washing our clothes by hand from the past several days we were laundry-less. Aarushi took this opportunity to do something she had been waiting for since Kansas City…she got her eyebrows threaded. And I decided to make history. I sat down, started, added pictures, and finished a blog within two hours. The first and only time I will have ever done so. 

    At lunch, Caroline, Tatiana, and I learned about the Fallon Youth Club’s mission. They offer incredibly affordable and educational aftercare for kids around Fallon. They receive a lot of grants and have a friends of FYC group where people donate to help cover the costs for many kids. There’s a waiting list to join this club, since FYC has 10 employees and wants to maintain the faculty to student ratio, so everyone has a quality experience. Foster kids are automatically enrolled, and so they get priority in this waiting list. But they mainly serve kids with single parents who are at or slightly above the poverty level.

    We of course do research about the places we teach at beforehand, but we get to learn so much more about the impact they have on their communities when we meet them in person. 

    Drew and Nate teaching about electromagnetic motors for the last time

    Earlier today, we had decided that Caroline and Aarushi would speak on all of our behalfs for this event Tatiana’s friend was hosting. And so they took some time to give their responses at first to a zoom meeting of what looked like a couple people. Then the camera switched over and they realized they were talking in front of at least 400. I’m infinitely grateful they volunteered, because if I had to do that, I think I’d sh*t my pants live. From what I heard, they did great and managed to make us sound like the super awesome, amazing, genius, talented, and athletic student cyclists we truly are.

    While Aarushi was busy divulging her academic career on zoom, I was running our Monster Genome workshop for the very last time. I genuinely had a wonderful time. All the kids were so engaged. One groaned that his brain was hurting and when I asked him if that was because he did or didn’t understand it, he said he did. It just required focus to learn. Does that mean their brains were stretching? Did I successfully inspire them to grow? Wow, what a great thought. I hope so.

    Aarushi doing her best to help this little kid cut felt

    The four of them made monsters that were really accurate to what the parents’ kid would like. One even made her monster’s arms move freely. They all decided on incredibly creative names, Billy, Timmy, Jimmy, and Lily, since the monsters are all siblings of course.

    Billy and Jimmy with their parents

    To celebrate finishing our last learning festival, we decided to donate most of our good LF supplies to FYC. Instead of having it sit and decay in milkdrop, we figured these kids could actually make use of all these crafting, chemistry, and electronic supplies.

    It may have been the last LF day, but you know what we hadn’t yet experienced the last of…team meetings! While I was busy cleaning up, others had decided that tomorrow (barely) we were going to wake up at 1am in order to beat the heat, wind, etc. And to make all of us more efficient, we were going to sleep in our bibs! Now there was some pushback on that part. In the end we decided that we’d have our suitcases packed in the car tonight, and our bibs ready to put on. I really admire the motivation behind Nate’s proposal that we all sleep in our bibs, however it would only work if those who needed that extra time did not veto the idea straightaway. So I debated whether or not I should wear mine, but decided against it, since I figured it wouldn’t make much of a difference in the end. But Nate still wore his, and I still admire his dedication.

    We got dinner for tonight and breakfast for the next morning delivered to us, all thanks to the generous people at FYC.

    Due to this 1 am wake up, we all wanted to get to sleep around 8 ish. I think the most dedicated of us managed to, but I stayed awake for a bit to make the route with Aarushi. She was the driver for tomorrow and after went to Walmart to stock up on sodas and Arizona iced tea for our liquid diet. 

    Before she left though, she slightly angrily recounted how Drew was lying on the same couch she had slept on yesterday. I figured he wanted to move since the motion sensor lights in the Learning Center were incredibly aggressive and kept turning on every time one of us turned over. Drew and I kept taking turns getting up like zombies and swatting off the lights, until 4 am when we just gave up. So Drew was peacefully scrolling on the couch. And then Caroline discovered that Nate took the same blanket I took from her the night before. She, very reasonably, flipped out and so in retaliation Aarushi offered to buy the white cheddar Cheezits that only Caroline likes. She ended up getting salt and pepper white cheddar Cheezits and this snack mix concoction similar to Chex mix. The next morning, Nate would be incredibly excited to enjoy this novelty.

    See you next time in the last. blog. ever.

    – Carmen

  • Day 68: Oh How am I Gonna Be an Optimist About This

    Day 68: Oh How am I Gonna Be an Optimist About This

    Austin, NV to Fallon, NV — 111.9 mi, 2531 ft

    Mt. Airy, NV to Fallon, NV — ~95 mi, 2000 ft

    Contrary to Freytag’s Pyramid (pictured below), which shows a story’s typical narrative structure, this blog starts at the climax of the ride: biking on Highway 50, at night, at 12:00 am. The previous blog explains the reason for our current predicament, but in case you missed it, I’ll give a quick summary. To avoid the heat, wind, and cars that we would experience biking in the daytime, our goal was to finish most of the century as soon as possible. 

    Our adrenaline was high, and we had just finished our first rest stop when the clock struck 12. At the rest stop, I downed half of my Starbucks Frappucino for an extra energy boost and decided to put on my jacket in case it got colder the next leg. To preserve visibility since our jackets were dark and non-reflective, Aarushi and I tied our white jerseys around our necks to create a white cape, feeling like superheroes riding into the darkness. We pulled out the speaker for the 2nd leg of our ride, blasting music to keep the good vibes going and to keep ourselves awake. We queued some absolute bangers such as Pompeii by Bastille and E.T. by Katy Perry. 

    Out in the desert in the absence of light pollution, the only source of light were our bike lights and the occasional flashes of a late night trucker approaching in the distance. When we did see a car approaching, we ran a tight ship in ensuring there was no chance of being run over. We would yell “CAR,” switch off the road, and wait for the car to pass before getting back on. I’m sure these truckers were extremely confused by the sight of us at such strange hours in the middle of nowhere. The red lights of our van could also be seen pretty prominently from miles out, and often became my motivator to keep going as the night (or morning?) dragged on. Towards the end of this leg, the tiredness was setting in, but we tried to keep our spirits high.

    I think something I’ve realized on this trip is that I am a relative optimist about most things, which I wouldn’t have necessarily believed if you told me that before. Hence the lyric from Pompeii that is the title of this blog! I truly approach situations with the idea that’ll it work out, even if I’m not extremely vocal about this belief. This helped a lot during moments like this where it might be easy to complain and wallow in the difficulty of the situation, but my outlook kept me excited and energetic enough to get through the night. I think I was riding some weird giddy “isn’t it crazy that we’re doing this” energy the entire time (or at least up until 2:00 am). 

    It was so dark that looking in an area without our bike lights felt like I was closing my eyes, which was also extremely surreal. Like, your eyes are wide open but it’s just pitch black. Kind of crazy. We also started getting extremely cold at some points as we passed through warm and frigid pockets of air, but it kept us awake at least.

    After a bit, we agreed to stop at 60 miles into the ride to leave another 50 or so for the actual morning. Tatiana scouted ahead of a spot alongside the highway where we could safely park the car and cowboy camp — although “camp” is a strong word, since we were only really planning to sleep for a grand total of 1 hour. Finally, at around 4 am, we slept nice and cozy on our tarp and prepared to wake up at 5:30 am at first light.

    The wakeup was, as expected, extremely difficult, but we begrudgingly got on our bikes to tough out the final stretch. I had some leftover pizza for breakfast and the rest of the frappuccino. 

    Cowboy camping and first light
    Breakfast of champions

    It was immediately so much warmer with the sun out and windier than it was at night, so I was glad that we had gotten so much out the way with our night session. Although it was straight and flat for most of it, that honestly made it worse since there was so little stimulation for a mind that was running on little sleep. Thankfully, there were some interesting fighter jets that showed up towards the last section of the ride, performing cool tricks and flying extremely loudly. Apparently they were from a nearby naval air station, and they were flying so fast that whenever you turned to look where the sound was coming from, they were already quite a distance away from the origin since they were moving close to the speed of sound. At least, that was my understanding, but Drew could probably tell you more. Drew’s interest in planes also kept me awake as my eyes kept threatening to close, sharing his immense knowledge of the planes above us and exactly their functions.

    We rounded out the ride at a diner in town, getting free biscuits and gravy from the lovely workers there who saw how exhausted and hungry we were… we scarfed those down, and I was personally ready for a heavy nap. However, Aarushi, Carmen, and Nunu wanted to make the ride officially 200 miles (since we were at 190 miles), so they went back out in the 100+ degree heat, which I commend but knew was not important to me. I had been sick this entire ride (as a lingering virus was making the rounds, in the order of Aarushi → Drew → Me and Tatiana) and could feel it really starting to hit. We went to the Fallon Youth Club, our learning festival and hosts for the next two nights), and promptly fell asleep in various arrangements in the room.

    Thank you Jerry’s!
    • Our dispersal across the room
    • Our dispersal across the room
    • Our dispersal across the room
    • Our dispersal across the room

    After a long nap, I woke up to find everyone back and sleeping. I walked around the facility a bit, and met one of the directors of the club who told us that they had arranged meals for us over the next couple of days, which was very kind! Slowly, everyone started waking up, and we got dinner in Fallon — including a yummy poke bowl that I didn’t take a picture of until I devoured it.

    Not aesthetic but I need more photos

    For the rest of the evening, we relaxed and slowly recovered, finally doing our laundry from the past couple of days and mentally preparing for our last learning festival! It’s kind of crazy that we’re on our last one, but we were looking forward to it, knowing we’d be much more well-rested and in such an amazing facility.

    Ominous tower of laundry

    Tune in into the next blog for how it went, and our preparations for crossing into California!

    See you one more time,

    Caroline

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

    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:

    The usual chud setup
    and chud breakfast
    • 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
    Pavement so 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 💭
    As some kind of cosmic alignment we found this big bottle of iced tea on the side of the highway
    • 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
    Said rest stop
    • 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
    Carmen doing Duolingo
    • 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.

  • Day 66: POV I’m a Bike

    Day 66: POV I’m a Bike

    Ely, NV to Eureka, NV — 79.2 mi, 4543 ft

    The state I am in is a bit hard to describe. I am having the best time of my life and seeing sights I never thought I would get to see, but at the same time, my chains haven’t been lubricated in days. My tires get pumped sometimes, but not every day. My front and back wheel axles both keep coming loose randomly, my left brake is sticky, my gears don’t always shift, and the grips on my handlebars have seen better days. I know that Tatiana loves me, but boy is this trip rough on me and all the other bikes. The loss of Drewbike was especially tough on all of us, and I feel like it’s been an adjustment for Drewbike2 to fit in, considering his hydraulic brakes and bright pink color. I’m honestly just glad we don’t have to make it back the other way!

    Regardless of how I am doing physically, my favorite part of the trip so far has been getting to see the Spokes members bond and have a magical time. Last night, I got to sleep another night in the library with the Spokes crew instead of in some shed, and I saw a few of them go crazy with laughter while working on a massive puzzle. Tatiana seemed to be going especially crazy, singing a song over and over again and even harmonizing with Drew? I’m not really sure what was going on, but maybe it isn’t meant for me to know. When the team said they were going to go watch a movie at 11 pm and still wake up at 6 am the next morning, I had a sneaking suspicion that they were being overly ambitious with their plan. Regardless, I turned in for the night, waking up only briefly when they snuck back into the library room at 1:30 am.

    In the morning, it was evidently clear that no 6 am movement was occurring, and instead, I saw the first signs of life at 8 am from Nunu and Nate, who were sleeping in the library’s office. Today is a very special day, as it is Nate’s birthday!! I had previously overheard the team’s secret plan of waking up extra early and being completely silent in the morning to celebrate Nate. All summer, he kept asking for us to play the quiet game, so I thought it was a great idea and was ready to be silent myself (though I had no faith in Tatiana), but it seemed like the morning took a different turn. When Nunu started giggling in the library’s office, and Tatiana immediately said happy birthday to Nate, I knew that the quiet game was over.

    Regardless, the team was in a great mood, largely added to by the fact that a kind woman from the White Pine County Library had brought a phenomenal tray of breakfast burritos and cinnamon rolls for the team to enjoy. While all of them were getting ready, I was still standing untouched in the corner. Instead of spending her time lubing my chains, Tatiana decided to have a gun show in the restroom. Of course, I wasn’t there, but she generously gave me this photo to include in my blog.

    Finally, at 9:40, Tatiana came up to me for the first time to refill my water bottles. I can’t complain too much, because the new pink water bottle I get to carry around is SICCKKKK! As she walked away, I noticed that the rest of the team was suspiciously taking turns writing something at one of the library tables. Of course, Nate decided to walk towards them, inches away from spoiling his birthday surprise. Tatiana very unsubtly attempted to distract him, but I do think that Nate may have seen the card they were working on.

    At 10:00, Tatiana brought me outside, and I got to enjoy the sunshine and fresh air with my bike friends. Tatiana finished packing things and putting on her sunblock, and at 10:15, we were off!

    The first stretch was longer than the team had been doing the past few days, but I was so excited because all the bikes stayed together! Usually, Tatiana tends to bike a little… slow… so I don’t get to bike with my friends, but this stretch was different! The group discussed all the blogs they wanted to write (including this one) and the plan for the Spokes end-of-trip party. Tatiana also made some calls to finally schedule her long-awaited leg waxing appointment at Lake Tahoe and called her boyfriend Noah! I feel like I get to eavesdrop on so many of Tatiana’s conversations with the team and with her family, even though most of the time it sounds like Tatiana’s family either can’t hear anything because of the wind or there is no service in the first place.

    At the first rest stop, it was time to unveil the big surprise! As I learned, the reason the first stretch was so long was to give Drew extra time to race to the grocery store and buy cake and a car full of Nate’s favorite snacks! There were Nilla Wafers, peach rings, Cheez-its, navel oranges… everything our birthday boy could dream of. The team had a hugely fun birthday celebration for Nate, consisting of an oversized party hat, a hand-decorated birthday cake courtesy of Drew which had Nate at the center of a Venn Diagram comparing cyclists and feminists, and a bunch of those birthday kazoo type things. The team also presented Nate with the birthday card and a silly magnet of a goofy woman on a bicycle. It made my bike-heart happy to see the team so joyously celebrating Nate!

    Just before getting back to the road, I heard the team making a Spokes playlist, which Tatiana would end up listening to for the rest of the day. The goal of the playlist was to capture songs from the summer that would remind the team of Spokes, and it made me nostalgic to hear Tatiana humming songs from the past two months throughout the day’s bike ride. If you’re interested, you can listen to it too! 
    https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7J8mwEkqZCYOeyR4odLpQZ?si=HXUjlnkzRkmT2k4UYcIHEw&utm_source=copy-link&pi=5KvOhV-_SFaP6

    As we set off for the second stretch, I heard Natebike behind me make a weird sound, and then for some reason Natebike and Nunubike stayed behind. I kept thinking they would pass me like usual, but 5 miles in, they were nowhere to be found. At this point, Tatiana was worried, and after a few calls I understood that Natebike’s tire had popped and that Drew would drive back to Ely for a new tire. 

    At the next rest stop, we knew that Drew would not be able to make it back in time, so I lay on the ground next to Aarushibike, Carmenbike, and Carolinebike while the four girls found shade under some heavy machinery on the side of the road. I could tell that their energy was a little bit low in the heat, but they tried to be positive, and Tatiana suddenly remembered the Rice Krispie treat she had hidden in my saddle bag.

    Eventually, the four of them decided to get back on the road again, and we finished our second big climb of the day under Nevada’s scorching sun. I could feel that Tatiana’s pedaling was starting to slow down and she seemed more exhausted than usual. When we came to the last rest stop of the day, it became evident why. Tatiana and Caroline were both feeling quite ill, possibly catching onto whatever Aarushi and Drew had been experiencing.

    Beyond the brutal heat, I also saw the Spokes team assaulted by flies, with the pesky creatures attacking all of their food and everything in sight. Drew was going especially crazy from this, since he had to drive the minivan with all of the flies trapped inside! Luckily, Nunu happened to have bought a fly swatter earlier in the trip, and Nate decided that this was the opportunity for him to wage war on the flies. See the video below for a live-action of Nate’s fly assassination attempt.

    After accepting their fate and the flies’ dominance, the team was ready for the final stretch, a 1,500 ft climb over 9 miles. I could feel Tatiana seriously struggling on this climb, forcing herself to pedal even though she felt extremely ill. At some point, Aarushi and Aarushibike noticed how tough it was going, and Aarushi started to retell another one of the Percy Jackson books to help distract Tatiana. I think it worked, because her pedaling did get faster and she started to take less frequent breaks!

    Eventually, Tatiana, Aarushi, Aarushibike, and I finished the climb, and sped through the downhill to meet up with all of my other bike friends at a gas station in the town of Eureka. The church we would stay at was 18 miles north of our route, and Drew was already unpacking the car at the church so that we could shuttle. Tatiana was in a pretty rough state, so she quickly bought an Arizona iced tea from the gas station while we waited for Drew to come back. When he arrived, he told all the bikers that he had bought pizzas for them to eat and loaded me on the back of the van for my joyride.

    As soon as we got to the church, Tatiana was ready to crash, and quickly showered, ate pizza, and hit the hay to try and recover from the illness. 

    As for me, I got to enjoy a night out under the stars, watching Carmen, Aarushi, and Nunu cowboy camp to enjoy the beautiful night sky. 

    With all my bikey-love,

    Tatianabike

  • Day 65: The Legend of the Rider in White

    Day 65: The Legend of the Rider in White

    Learning Festival in Ely, NV — 0 mi, 0 ft (or 36.44 mi, 2254 ft)

    Today, we woke up strewn across the floor of the library of a high school in Ely, Nevada approximately 5 miles away from a 0% contained wildfire. Certainly not what I foresaw for my life if you asked me a couple of years ago. 

    Spokes can be described as a fluid since the team expands to fill up all the space (and time) it is given. In this case, the library of a high school.

    We need to be at the learning festival location by 9am for our learning festivals. We woke up at 8:30am. It goes without saying that we did not eat breakfast as everyone ran around between hallway bathrooms trying to get ready quickly (except for me, who limped around since I cut the bottom of my foot on a rock in a lake at Great Basin National Park back in Baker, NV). 

    We drove over to the library where the LF was being hosted “only” 10 minutes late, after texting the library that we would be a bit late, and quickly scrambled to get the LF boxes out of the car. At that moment, we got a text back from the library staff that they weren’t expecting us until 11:30am. Strange…

    Not that strange, actually. Turns out that this LF was scheduled for 11:00am to 5:00pm (as opposed to the usual 9:00am to 3:00pm) and that we had just forgotten. Suddenly, a call we received from the library staff the previous day in which they ended the call with “See you all tomorrow morning… or I guess, afternoon actually” made sense. At the time, we had just ignored it as strange, but clearly, we are the strange ones. 

    What follows was a textbook example of the Spokes planning process. I’ll try my best to recall all steps throughout the process, however, strong disclaimer that there were certainly more steps that aren’t included:

    1. Let’s go wait at a cafe.
    2. Drew doesn’t want to wait at a cafe, and wants to go back to the high school and will bike to the library later.
    3. We start driving to the high school and then will drive to the cafe.
    4. Our bikes are still sitting at a random campsite. Since at this point the wildfire doesn’t seem to be a concern anymore (see below), it’d be good not to leave them there more than necessary. Otherwise, since the LF ends late, we’d have to go pick them up at night.
    5. We need somewhere to leave the LF boxes since the 5 bikes at the campsite don’t fit in the van unless the boxes are out. Let’s go leave the boxes back at the library.
    6. Bringing the bikes back will cut it close to the start of the LF. Since there’s only ~15 students signed up for the LF, we can do 3 groups of 5, run 3 workshops at once, and let the pair running the fourth workshop go get the bikes.
    7. Nate has nothing to do and is down to go get the bikes, meaning Drew should come go as well. 
    8. Drew has some work to do and would rather stay. Nunu can join but then two workshops are understaffed. Drew will help Caroline for the first workshop to avoid understaffing.
    9. Since the bikes are going to be in the van during the LF and we’ll need to put the LF boxes in later, some people will need to bike back to the highschool after the LF.
    10. The bike rack is back at the high school, good thing we’re going to drop Drew off there anyways.
    11. Time to drive back to the library to drop off the boxes. Unfortunately, we don’t actually know which building the library is.
    12. Walk into the first building we see and be told it’s actually a courthouse. Someone shows us the way to the library while we carry the LF boxes. 
    13. I walk back to watch the car because I’m not much help limping around. We left all the doors open, the car running, and the keys inside the car. 
    14. We drive cafe people to the cafe, at which point they realize they’ll have to get back to the library and they don’t want to walk. New plan: they’ll order while we go back to the highschool, then we’ll pick them up on the way back to go get the bikes, and drop them off at the library. The cafe and library are on the way to the bikes so it’s not too egregious.
    15. Drive Drew to the high school. Pick up the bike rack. 
    16. Grab breakfast from McDonalds since the cafe people aren’t ready yet and we haven’t had food. 
    17. Pick up cafe people, drop them off at library, and go to get the bikes. 

    Nothing too interesting on the car ride to pick up the bikes, but Nunu and I did discuss how typical this inefficiency has become lately. At the same time, we seem to do inefficiency so efficiently.

    Still there 😁

    We got back to the library just as the first workshop was finishing up and Drew and I jumped into our electric motors workshop for the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th slots. 

    This “motor” spins so fast the camera frame rate can’t capture it. Turn up your audio to hear it whir. 

    At 1:45pm, we stopped for lunch. With the kids being watched by the super helpful library staff + Tatiana + Caroline, the rest of us went to a nearby burger place to pick up lunch for all 7 of us. We came back with this haul of huge burgers with a ton of fries. Too bad we aren’t biking today, it’d be great fuel.

    Picture of some rabid animals not waiting for the rest of the team or for the picture to be taken to devour their meals.
    Towards the end of lunch, Tatiana and Drew led the kids in a game of pictionary.

    After finishing up lunch, we went back into teaching and wrapped up the learning festival around 5pm. Tatiana had taken the kids to some bouncy castles at a festival across the street from the library, so we waited for her to come back with the kids that hadn’t been picked up yet, as well as for Aarushi and Carmen to get back from looking at the town’s main street, to take a picture with the library staff. Unfortunately, Aarushi and Carmen took so long that the other staff member left.

    After we finished packing our stuff and cleaning + vacuuming the room we held the LF in, we walked across the street to spend some more time at the festival. We checked out the booths, some people got matching temporary tattoos, we played Connect 4, and Carmen and Caroline raced each other in an inflatable obstacle course.

    Pictures of the festival, which was thrown by the city’s police department.

    A photo finish! Apparently, Carmen and Caroline kept getting cut in line by little kids while inside the obstacle course, so it took them like 5 minutes to get through.

    After about an hour of loitering at this festival, I was getting bored, which translated to me complaining to Nunu about not being able to finish yesterday’s ride and fence-sitting the idea of finishing the ride today. 

    We had stopped the ride partly because of how hazy/smoky it looked along the route causing concern about bad air quality, but also because we were worried the wildfire might cause road closures along our route since it had doubled from 4k to 8k acres that morning. Additionally, the wind had shifted to blow the fire towards the road we were biking on, and we were worried we’d be separated from Drew (who was waiting for us in Ely, read yesterday’s blog for more context) if the road got closed. 

    In the end, we were probably the only people concerned about the fire in all of Ely because no one in the town showed any urgency or concern about the fire (as a football coach at the high school put it when I asked him about everyone’s lack of concern, “There’s nothing we can do about it, so why worry.”) 

    As soon as we had arrived in the town, however, and certainly by today when the air was clear and the fire had stopped growing in size, we realized that we may have been overly reactive (e.g. moving our bikes out of the town, cancelling the ride, etc.) – what’s new? In the grand scheme of things, erring on the safer side was the best thing to do, but I personally don’t like missing out on any biking and somewhat felt like we had quit/given up on yesterday’s ride. 

    After conveying my displeasure at not rising up to the challenge of the wildfire at length to Nunu, she said something along the lines of “If you really wanted to finish the ride, you should’ve planned ahead better earlier to do it right after the LF ended. If you’re not gonna do something about it, stop complaining” (she didn’t say anything close to this, but I read between the lines). 

    Feeling inspired by Nunu’s tough love, I decided I would finish yesterday’s ride. 

    I asked around to see if anyone else was interested but I just got various versions of “No”, “Why would I do that”, “You’re weird”, and an “Any other day I would” from Drew (but I’m pretty sure this is the second time I’ve heard this 🤔). 

    So at 6:20pm, Nunu, Caroline, and I drove back to the high school (and then drove back to the festival because Drew had the key, and then drove back to the high school). I quickly got ready while Nunu and Caroline went to pick up some drinks for the team from McDonalds (including a big lemonade for me to fuel up on, as if the giant burger from earlier wasn’t enough). Nunu dropped Caroline off with lots of assorted gear/stuff to put back in the high school, including our dinner that the library had very kindly cooked for us, and then Nunu and I drove off 30 minutes to the point where we had stopped yesterday’s ride to complete the last ~35 miles of the ride.

    Around the same time, we received this picture of the team receiving massages that were “for the firefighters”… 

    A bit after 7:30pm, Nunu dropped me off to start the ride. She also kindly offered to drive support car for me since she was just going to work on her blog in the car anyways. So with that, I headed off on my ride, dressed up in a pretty cool looking outfit if you ask me. 

    I felt like some kind of assassin off to eliminate some climbs. At some point yesterday, someone (possibly maybe me, but not sure) came up with the name of “The Rider in White” for the mysterious masked biker riding through the wildfires of Nevada. 

    At this point, the sky was a super pretty pink color and the vibes were pretty amazing. Unfortunately, this was because the sun was setting. Oh well, I knew I’d be spending most of my time biking in the dark when I signed up for this.

    Would most people bike 36 miles to see this view? Probably not, but it was still nice.

    I biked through the valley, enjoying the lovely sunset and last bits of light, before the sun set and I began the 2000 ft, 8 mile climb out of the valley that would comprise the hardest part of the ride. An additional benefit of this ride was that, since I was the only one biking, I was free to bike as fast as I wanted without having to wait for anyone else – so I decided to take advantage of the ride to push myself more than I’m usually able to during rides. 

    Part way through the climb, I came up on the first rest stop that had been included on the route. I decided to call ahead to ask Nunu to look for a bag of peach rings from the snack box so that I could just grab them and keep biking without stopping (these peach rings have 20g of carbs in 3 rings and a total of 90g of carbs in the whole bag, meaning they’re a great way to shove fuel into your body). When I rolled up to the car, my amazing driver had them sitting in the passenger seat for me and I was able to grab them without my Garmin even pausing the ride.

    I finished up the climb (after spending ~50 minutes on 8 miles, the entire ride took 2 hours so…) as well as the bag of peach rings, and enjoyed a quick descent back down the other end of the mountain before the route flattened out again (only slightly worried about a deer jumping into the road and ending the summer early). 

    As I came up on the last rest stop, I called Nunu to let her know that I had great momentum and was gonna skip the rest stop. I felt pretty bad that she had spent the time driving/waiting around and in the end I didn’t even spend any time stopped, but at that same moment I looked up and saw the brightest stars I had seen all trip as well as views of the Milky Way. I told her this which seemed to maybe make the ride worth it because she seemed very excited about the stars. 

    I arrived at the high school a bit after 9:30pm, having spent a total of 2 hours on the ride. I headed into the library where everyone was seated around doing their own thing. Nunu and I made ourselves some taco bowls for dinner, and then her, Drew, and I headed to McDonalds for yet another round of yummy drinks. 

    Some of us took less orthodox methods of transportation to McDonalds.
    A totally reasonable amount of drinks. For Nunu, a large water. For me, two large waters, a medium mango pineapple smoothie, and a medium lemonade. Definitely an overzealous order since only the smoothie got finished. 

    Drew headed back to the high school while Nunu and I drove a bit out of the city because I wanted to take another look at the stars. Unfortunately, I didn’t get much chance to really appreciate them while riding since I was focused on biking fast and kept nearly swerving off the road whenever I stuck my head out to look at the stars above me. 

    We spent some time lying on the floor enjoying the stars for the first real time this trip, and seeing like 5-10 shooting stars. 

    Some time towards the end of our time stargazing, it passed midnight and I turned 23. Happy birthday to me or something.

    We drove back to the high school where we found the entire team about to start a movie… Clearly none of us have any concern about our hot 80 mile ride tomorrow. 

    Meanwhile, I showered and then headed to bed, wondering if the people of Ely were telling each other the story of the Rider in White, who biked in the night through the flames of the wildfire.

    – Nate

  • Day 64: Is something burning?

    Day 64: Is something burning?

    Baker, NV to Ely, NV — 61.7 mi, 4469 ft

    I woke up super sick, unprepared to bike. It was the first day where I would have to SAG on a non-mandatory basis. Or was it? The potential savior of my pride was a wildfire that was blowing smoke into the valleys through which we needed to bike. Nunu transported me to Ely as the rest of the team monitored the air quality. As it increased steadily into “very unhealthy” ranges, they decided to call off today’s route. I’m someone who values the sanctity of our cross-country crossing, and introducing discontinuity into our route typically upsets. However, I was not at all upset about this one, because there was no way I could have biked- I was so sick. And this way, I can upkeep my record of not having any non-entire-team sags.

    I’m writing this blog a little while after the trip ended. Our schedule in Nevada became very very tough- as you’ll soon find out… eventually. It’s a little too far back to give a typical detailed chronological play-by-play. So, I’m going to pivot a bit.

    Once I got to Ely, Nunu left to go shuttle the bikers through the wildfire smoke. Meanwhile, the pile of over-the-counter medicine I consumed was starting to relieve some of my symptoms, so I gathered up the energy to walk to the Carl’s Jr in the gas station across the street from the high school that was hosting us. 

    I ate a bacon cheeseburger as I talked to some of the dozens of firefighters who were on lunch break. It tasted surprisingly good, which made me think… I should write a burger ranking blog. I ate a lot of cheeseburgers on the trip, so this list will not be comprehensive. If I don’t remember the burger, then it probably doesn’t belong here anyways.

      5.   In-n-Out.

    Following my well-documented In-n-out experience in CO Springs, I figured I had to include it on this list for the sake of giving my opinion on In-n-Out burgers. I think that In-n-Out is like the Chick-fil-a of burgers. People like it because it’s a consistent, easy, cheap, and reliable 6/10 meal. Not because its a great burger.

      4. Dairy Queens throughout Virginia.

    There were so many Dairy Queens in Virginia. I feel like dairy queen gives you everything you need for a biking day. Burgers, Fries, Soda, Ice Cream. DQ makes the list because somehow, the burgers always come out hot and fresh. I like how they mix up the types of cheese on the double. 

          3.  Freddy’s in Colorado Springs.

    This chain never disappoints. Smashburgers hit so hard on a biking trip. I really loved their shoe string fries. You can grab like 20 of them at a time and dip them in the jalapeno fry sauce. Super tasty… earning number 3.

          2.  TJ’s Mainstreet Grill in Overbrook, Kansas

    In the era of private equity owned restaurants, finding a quality non-fast-food burger can be tough on the wallet. TJ’s really impressed me with the value. A double bacon cheeseburger will set you back $7. I was expecting them to bring out a burger with 2 dimes as patties. I couldn’t be more wrong. Between the buns layed 2 massive ⅓ pound patties and a generous portion of juicy bacon. It wasn’t just the value that sets this burger apart, it was the taste as well. Truly the most magnificent way to finish a 90 mile day, earning the number 2 spot

    1. Milt’s in Moab Utah.

    When I finished my ride into Moab the morning after our storm delay, I rode past this white shack that looked kinda like the old retro McDonalds but without the arches. The smell from outside captured me, and I couldn’t take my mind off of the idea of eating a burger there. Later, at our AirBnB, I convinced the rest of the team to have our lunch there. Our team, particularly the female members of our team, seem to have a problem with burgers. They’ll hype up dry pasta and reheated lasagna every day like it’s cocaine but turn their cheek to a delectable cheeseburger (I think they are being performative). I don’t know what their deal is. Anyways, this is the first time I’ve seen them all united in pure pleasure and satisfaction at the taste of a burger, earning it my number 1 spot.

  • Day 63: Romanticizing the Mundane

    Day 63: Romanticizing the Mundane

    Milford, UT to Baker, NV — 84.9 mi, 4,539 ft

    Video script:

    Today was the day we would cross into our second to last state of the whole summer, Nevada! We were biking from Milford, Utah to Baker, Nevada over 84.9 miles and 4,539 ft of elevation. I was not particularly looking forward to today’s ride since it predicted a lot of climbing and possible strong headwinds but when was I ever? To be honest, this summer has given me a love-hate relationship with biking. Because when the alarm blares at 6am I seriously feel like I want to do anything other than get out of my cozy sleeping bag and bike all day in the hot sun for what feels like forever. Then again, I just know that when the summer ends I will seriously miss this crazy lifestyle we’re living.

    With no choice but to bike, we all geared up, said our goodbye’s to our driver of the day, Bacon, and then were off. I like the feeling of the momentum from those first few pedal strokes of each day with my whole team around me—it’s like we are seriously seizing the day and it’s the start of a new adventure as we usually have no idea what the day ahead holds.

    Unfortunately, the day ahead was holding a few big climbs and absolutely nothing to stimulate the mind as we biked in a straight line through this desert-like landscape. At the same time, it was kind of beautiful. I’ve never been on such an expansive road before that I could see literally multiple miles ahead and behind. Things that seemed close because I could see it in the distance, actually took much longer to pass by than I thought. This also included our support car, Mr. K, that is easy to spot from her bright orange camper top which always seemed so much closer than it felt to bike to.

    As I approached the first rest stop behind Nate and Drew, I was confused because I only saw their bikes at first sitting on the side of the road. Eventually, I found them tucked away behind a bush taking shade from the sun. Nate complained that he was feeling an incoming bonk so I dug through my bike bag and pulled out a week old bag of gummy worms that had melted into a gummy worm chunk! It actually wasn’t good but sometimes you just gotta eat even if you don’t feel like it. I also forced myself to take some bites while we waited for Bacon to come from the grocery store. Eventually, Caroline found us sitting sadly under this bush and joined us. Suddenly, Mr. K sped by! Nate yelled after her, “nooo come back.” Caroline called Carmen to turn around and all was well. Plus, she brought a delicious snack haul with her complete with all our favorites: crunchy green grapes, cheez-itz, nilla wafers, wheat thins, nature valley bars, pop tarts, soda, and a new one… peach rings! Now these peach rings were a serious trend setter for the rest of the trip (and I know this because I am making this after the trip has ended) because, as Nate and Drew love to talk about, the macros were great. You just needed to eat 6 peach rings to have enough carbs in one rest stop. After we devoured two bags, they sent Carmen back to get more peach rings for the next rest stop.

    Then there was more of the same biking, biking, biking. Now, here’s some clips of something interesting and novel, more biking! Okay now another rest stop… and now some more biking! To spice it up a little, we decided to pull out our tubs of macaroni salad and potato salad gifted to us by Nate’s family. Maybe not the wisest dairy heavy snack to have mid bike ride (especially as a lactose intolerant person) but they were yummy and we were bored and hungry.

    After some more biking and rest stopping, we finally reached the Nevada sign! Since we needed to wait for the whole group to arrive so we could all take a picture together (which would take maybe half an hour), we decided to all squeeze into the car to take refuge in the AC. This meant two people in the driver’s seat, two in the passenger, and one squeezed in the second row next to all our snacks. And our awesome driver, Carmen, sacrificed herself and stood outside next to the car and under a blanket for some shade. We all doomscrolled for a bit on our phones which was an insane dopamine hit after rarely scrolling all summer and after an extremely understimulating day of biking. When the whole team was finally gathered, we did our usual circular debate about helmets or no helmets and how to pose and blah blah blah. Then we all watched Carmen struggle to figure out how to take a selfie. For some reason her instinct was to take it with her left hand while standing to the right of the group? It was very funny.

    For the last 8ish mile stretch to our destination for the night, I drafted Drew who was drafting Nate in a sideways formation to try and minimize some insane crosswinds. When we pulled up to this adorable cafe-inn situation called Stargazer Inn & Bristlecone General Store, they had a sign outside welcoming us! We were so excited and were greeted by a very sweet cat and sweet staff who gave us a delicious dinner with yummy sandwiches, blueberries, chips, juice, and cookies. Looking around the store at all the brochures, I realized we were right next to Great Basin National Park! Caroline, who has of course been here before, told the group that she recommended we go take a look and it was only a ten ish minute drive. I was really really excited to hear this and one of the ladies at the cafe corroborated Caroline’s words and told us about this very short and beautiful hike we could do to a lake to go swimming. These are actually my buzz words and I was so determined to go. I tried to convince everyone else to join but this of course sparked another one of our favorite past times, discussing things in circles. Some people were very tired from the bike ride and wanted to rest while some people were interested in visiting the national park but only at night to go to a stargazing lecture and some people realllyyyyyyyy wanted to go swimming in a magical and secluded lake in the mountains like wow doesn’t that just sound awesome like who wouldn’t want to do that? Anyway, we decided to stop discussing and just take action since we were wasting precious time and so the plan was in motion. It was almost 5PM and we would go to the church to unpack everything, gather all our laundry, and then everyone would go to the local gas station to take showers and do the laundry. Then by 5:30PM the hiking and lake swimming people would leave, do the 30 minute drive to the trailhead, hike and swim for an hour, and head back to the church at 7PM to pick up the stargazing crew and drive back to the visitor center to join the stargazing lecture at 8PM. Haters will say that this was an extremely optimistic schedule but I will say that I was determined to make it work.

    The hiking swimming group ended up being myself, Nate, and Tatiana. The drive up was so beautiful as we went up some steep switchbacks into and above the clouds before eventually reaching the peak and seeing some very grand cliffs. Then the hike itself was one of my favorite hikes of the whole summer. Not only were we basically the only ones there but it weaved through a beautiful forest of tall birch trees and in the clearings were picture perfect views of the cliffs that surrounded us. It was also late afternoon and the sun was shining through the trees at a magical angle and wow it seriously looked like a fairytale. The three of us might’ve however come slightly unprepared as it was quite a rocky and uneven hiking trail and we were all either wearing slides or flip flops so here’s a clip of Nate struggling to keep his flip flops on.

    When we finally reached the lake, we saw some deer grazing and I just thought like wow, if I was a deer this would be my dream home. We did some lazing around on our picnic blanket we brought with us and then also did some swimming in this extremely cold lake. But this swimming was more like squatting in and violently shivering because it was very very cold. The bottom of the lake was also extremely muddy and rocky and there were thousands of tiny small bugs on the surface of the water? To be honest we’ve had much better swimming experiences this summer but at least we’ve done it all. Unfortunately, in the chaos of trying to quickly get out of the lake and wrap ourselves in our warm towels, Nate cut the bottom of his foot on a sharp rock. This was a little more dramatic than perhaps it needed to be because as the sun was setting and our friends were waiting for us to come pick them up, we were racing back down this trail as Nate hobbled and limped down using me as a crutch. When we eventually got to the car, I pulled out our handy dandy first aid kit and our gallon of sterile water. I told Nate to lie down horizontally and stick his foot upside down out of the car and proceeded to drench his foot in a waterfall of water in an attempt to rinse out all of the dirt. Tatiana has a big phobia of blood so she sat in the back of the car and cheered us on from afar. We then sanitized it with an alcohol pad and I did some makeshift bandage situation with some nonstick gauze and medical tape—call me surgeon Nunu.

    We made it back to the church exactly on time, as I knew we would, and loaded everyone in along with some more mac and cheese salad and potato salad for the road. Drew decided to stay back since he wasn’t feeling well. During the drive back, we noticed that the sky was bright pink and very hazy which was some subtle foreshadowing into the kind of ride we were about to have tomorrow. Luckily or unluckily for me, tomorrow was my driver day. We then arrived back at the national park and walked the red lit path toward the stargazing lecture. I was initially worried because the haziness in the sky made it difficult to see very many stars but the smoke shifted just enough for us to peer through.

    During the lecture we learned about the history and the technology behind the telescopes that have been able to let us see stars and then took turns looking through them at various stars in the sky. We started by looking at the middle of the handle of the big dipper which we learned was actually visually made up of two stars and supposedly only those with really really good vision could make out that there are actually two stars. Indeed, when I peered into the telescope I saw that there were not only two stars in that spot but many many many stars surrounding them. It just reminded me how vast the universe is and how small we truly are. Yet we are still able to have these insanely fulfilling experiences and days full of adventure and even despite everything else going on in the universe we are so lucky to have had the chance to be here together in this specific moment.

    We decided to head home a bit early and when we got back Drew sounded very sick indeed so I gave him a Nyquil. He foreshadowed to us that he might be taking a rest day tomorrow and be my passenger princess. With that, we all got ready and went to bed among the pews of this small church in Baker, Nevada. Who knows what tomorrow has in store for us because every day I wake up and we end up doing something unexpected and it’s so so fun to look forward to and I just hope the summer never ends.