Blog
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Day 15: Dog Days Are Over?
Hazard, KY to London, KY — 78.9 mi, 5620 ft I’m calling a team meeting. As you may already know, we are big on team meetings. So this is what we say when we find a lull in our conversation and we know we have something serious to discuss. This past week was a rollercoaster, from Aarushi’s tree crash to Caroline’s dog bite to sleeping barely 6 hours at an overcrowded camp site, our team…
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Day 14: Where do we go from here?
Learning Festival in Hazard, KY — 0 mi, 0 ft My eyelids peel slowly open. I hear a high-pitched voice coming from the door. I sit up in my bed and check the time– It reads 7:43am Is she out of her mind?? Recently, Tatiana has self assigned herself the task of waking up the whole team. Last night, the team agreed to wake up at 7:45 am. It’s not often you sleep on a…
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Day 13: Let me get a bite of that
Breaks Interstate Park, VA to Hazard, KY – 1.4 mi, -315 ft (85.1 mi, 4,749 ft) First driver x blogger day! 😅 My POV: (6:00 – 9:10 am) That morning we woke up at our bare bones campground (no electricity or water), and most of our devices were either dead or almost dead. Everyone was either tired, irritable, or slightly injured as they begrudgingly put on their bike gear. The first group consisting of Nate,…
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Day 12: Big A(hh) Mountain
Tazewell, VA to Breaks Interstate Park, VA — 72.59 mi, 5,103 ft Even if 72 miles looks short relative to some of the other distances we’ll be covering this summer, today was a longgg day for a variety of reasons. If I had to think of one, the only downside of having such a beautiful house to ourselves (generously provided to us by the Main Street Methodist Church) is that we had spread things everywhere,…
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Day 11: Playlist Across America
Learning Festival in Tazewell, VA — 0 mi, 0 ft We needed this nice calm day in the midst of the chaos of the days before and after (spoiler alert). Our team woke up in the huge church-house which we were inhabiting alone and LARPed* as a big happy TV-show-esque friend group who lives in a mansion together and has nothing to do but hang out as we leisurely cooked the most beautiful breakfast together,…
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Day 10: another nate blog where half the team gets SAG’d out
Blacksburg, VA to Tazewell, VA – 83.38 mi, 4744 ft One day I’d like to have an uneventful blog day but today is not that day. We woke up today at 6am for what would be our second longest ride so far: 83 miles to make up for our short 40 mile ride yesterday. I spent a lot of the morning rummaging through my stuff looking for my wallet. Because of his track record with…
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Day 9: Hopeful Wanderers
Roanoke, VA to Blacksburg, VA – 40.5 mi, 3,294 ft (~48.5 mi, ~4,794 ft counting our hiking adventure) Today marks the first day that anyone on the team has cooked! The winner of this title is Nate Mustafa, who valiantly prepared an entire carton of fresh chicken eggs (courtesy of Dirk and Krissie) in Steve and Debbie’s kitchen to accompany our delicious breakfast. Simultaneously, our team engaged in a serious discussion. Should we use the…
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Day 8: A Love Letter to My Team
Lexington, VA to Roanoke, VA — 67.5 mi, 3,419 ft Today was one of those days that felt like, maybe the novelty of biking across the country isn’t so novel anymore and it kind of set in that this routine we’ve been doing for the past week, we will keep doing for the next seventy days. Not in a bad way of course. Just that, now that it’s been a little over a week, the…
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Day 7: Dear Nate
Waynesboro, VA to Lexington, VA — 41.9 mi, 2,131 ft I woke up at 6am this morning to the sound of Nate’s alarm- I don’t bother setting one anymore because I sleep in the same room as Nate every night… at varying degrees of distance. Two nights ago, we shared a bed after a wolf spider big enough to swallow a child decided to stake a claim to my bed. Last night, however, I gathered…
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Day 6: Kids and Bugs
Learning Festival in Fluvanna, VA — 0 mi, 0 ft Today I woke up to Tatiana’s usual wake up call of her muttering “good morning my cuties”, despite my best effort to try and get an extra 15 minutes of sleep. After having Pam’s generous breakfast of biscuits and grits, we decided to be proactive and get ahead of any mold that might grow in our camping gear, since we had last packed it up…
MIT Spokes 2026 