MIT Spokes 2026

Tag: cycling-day

  • Day 31: Don’t Overlook Overbrook

    Day 31: Don’t Overlook Overbrook

    Kansas City, MO to Overbrook, KS — 75.5 mi, 3771 ft

    GUESS WHAT, BABY??? NEW STATE UNLOCCKKEDDD 🔥🔥🔥

    Personally, I was most excited to feel like Dorothy entering Kansas, especially since I have never been to the state before and have a wonderful place in my heart for the Wizard of Oz. 

    Our morning glory of waking up at the hotel was only slightly dampened by the 4 am wakeup time enforced by the extraordinarily hot temperatures displayed by the weather forecast, but otherwise Aarushi and I basked in our final moments in the queen bed before grudgingly getting out of bed and getting dressed. 

    With a little bit of extra speediness, Aarushi and I finished our morning routine earlier than expected and decided to take on an extra task: repacking the cooler for lunch. Fatal mistake. One of our condiments had spilled throughout the cooler, and it smelled absolutely TERRIBLE. Imagine dirty feet and rotten eggs all at once. I gagged.

    We began “Operation Clean Cooler”, which involved me rinsing all of the condiments and Aarushi scrubbing down the cooler in the shower with the hotel’s body wash and a bar of soap. Multiple “we need a new cooler” phrases were exchanged, but alas, the same cooler is still sticking with our group.

    At some point, we left the cooler in the shower to soak in soapy water, ate our breakfast bars, and headed downstairs to join the rest of the group. After a few minutes of applying sunblock and pumping up the tires, our group was off!

    A few minutes into the ride, we passed the slightly underwhelming “Kansas City, KS” street sign marking our transition into Kansas, and the team was only a little sad that we were now missing photos with both the Missouri and Kansas signs. The morning ride was beautiful, especially as we rode through a slightly sleepy western Kansas City and wondered as a group if the trend of western sides of cities being more affluent than eastern sides of cities was accurate or just our extrapolation.

    I think that this morning segment has been one of my favorite biking segments thus far on the trip, as we rarely get to bike through developed cities, especially in combination with the sunrise. It felt serene and like I was seeing a different, secret side of urban life. The ride itself to the first rest stop was also quite speedy, especially since Aarushi and I yapped on the ride and got to discuss impressive people in the computational biology space and the significance of being published in Nature magazine.

    The day only got better as we pulled into the parking lot of our first rest stop, met by the beautifully tantalizing sight of Dutch Bros (sorry, Drew). The entire team decided to get drinks, with everyone being normal except for Drew and Nate, who got an Electric Berry Rebel and a Strawberry Colada Rebel, respectively. The Electric Berry Rebel is their “vibrant, fruity energy drink combining blue raspberry and lime syrups,” and the Strawberry Colada Rebel is “their signature Rebel energy base with coconut, pineapple, and sweet cream, finished with fresh strawberry fruit on top.” You tell me if you think their drinks were yummy or not…

    Afterwards, I used the bathroom in an extremely luxurious “Body Lab” and saw the most Pilates reformers I have ever seen in my life, and then we were off again to the races. 

    On this next stretch of the ride, we saw some of the coolest clouds I have ever seen in the sky. Caroline accurately described them as “fish scale clouds,” and I seriously loved biking with my face to the sky rather than down to the Earth. 

    Almost immediately after identifying the beautiful sky, the team came across a section of the road that was closed. At this point, we capitalized on a very important feature of Kansas geography. All of the roads are perfect squares, with mandated “1 mile by 1 mile” plots of land as described by the Public Land Survey System. For context, this system was established by the Land Ordinance of 1785 to have a systematic way to partition, sell, and settle the land acquired by the US through the Treaty of Paris in 1783. This system was also particularly helpful in providing funds for the US to pay off its Revolutionary War debts. It is also very helpful in navigating a road closure: bike one more mile and take the next turn!

    After our detour, I biked with Drew through more back-country gravel roads, fittingly called Edgerton Rd (thank you Edgerton Center for sponsoring us!), and a mailbox with a metal plane on it pulled us into an intricate conversation about the international history of fighter jets. Drew is an Aerospace major and knows everything about planes, literally, so it was awesome to get the insider scoop. We both wonder if the Kansas resident knows that he is, in fact, displaying a Russian fighter jet on his lawn…

    As we approached our rest stop, our Garmin sneakily tried to route us back to the pre-detour route, but Drew and I used our amazing math skills to realize that we would have to go back a mile east on the square grid only to do another mile west again later (not efficient!). Instead, we kept riding straight down the road and quickly hit our rest stop. 

    The team was met with our usual spread of snacks and an excited Nunu, who had already visited a delicious pastry shop and amazingly shared her glorious haul of a yummy breakfast sandwich and delicious pastry. This rest stop, like almost all others, involved a lot of sitting around and stuffing our faces with food (calories… we need more calories…).

    When we hit the road again, this time I biked with Carmen and Aarushi. My side questing dreams were quickly fulfilled when I saw a plant nursery on the side of the road and begged the girls to stop with me. It turns out that Vinland Valley Nursery is far more than a plant nursery. It is a family-owned business that combines a pick-your-own flower lot, a ceramics shop, hundreds of species of plants for sale, in the springtime, a coffee shop, and year-round activities and workshops that the community can participate in. We daydreamed about starting flower shops of our own, drank generously provided iced beverages, yapped with the family that owned the nursery, and meandered around the property soaking in the pretty plants. 

    We also got to experience a personal favorite part of the nursery, the fun chicken! See the video below for what a fun chicken is and how much joy it brought the three of us.

    At this point, we were naively hopeful that we were near the last rest stop until I heard a terrifyingly horrible sound beneath me. My tire popped on the gravel. A call to Nunu also let us know that Caroline’s tire suffered a similar fate further on in the route, only seconds after mine. Thankfully, this problem was alleviated by some elbow grease from Aarushi and Carmen, as well as by stealing Nunu’s tire off of her bike. Caroline’s bike apparently sealed itself! Still not fully clear on how this sealant stuff works in the tires, but hey, I’m not one to complain!

    Nunu told us that before coming to rescue us, she had gone to visit an extremely cute town called Lawrence, where she found postcards and also saw a Trek bike shop that could fix my tires. With this in mind, we decided to skip the last rest stop and sent Nunu to the end of the route, where she unloaded our things and undertook a mission to Lawrence with Nate, my tire, and Caroline’s seemingly stable tire.

    Meanwhile, you may have noticed that our team hadn’t actually eaten lunch. We thought that the 4 am wakeup would let us arrive at our destination by 1 pm, meaning we could eat lunch afterwards, but of course, the universe had other plans, including an irresistible side quest and two popped tires. This meant that on the last few miles of our trip, I bonked, AKA experiencing a severe drop in energy when the body runs out of stored carbohydrates. Not fun. Thank you, Carmen, for distracting me with a great conversation about our personal opinions on what aspects of Spokes we enjoyed most and for offering your emergency bars as fuel.

    What IS fun, though, is the rest of our evening with the team. Upon arrival, our lovely host Scott told us that after showers, he would take us to the local tavern for BURGERRRSSS!!!! And not just any burgers, these were insanely delicious burgers that the tavern was apparently famous for (success, Drew). Nunu and Nate, who were still in Lawrence taking care of the bikes, also loved this idea and met us at the tavern. Paired with a World Cup match playing in the corner and a deep conversation (my favorite thing ever) about marriage, politics, wealth, and our personal experiences as team members from different parts of the United States, dinner made my heart and stomach extremely happy.

    The only thing that could and did make this day EVEN better was Scott’s offer to play pickleball and his reminder that we needed to be even more fun than last year’s team. Of course, we couldn’t resist, and our entire team headed to the courts. Sitting in Scott’s truck, we saw a water tower that very fittingly proclaimed, “Don’t Overlook Overbrook!” and honestly, we tend to agree. Awesome town.

    Spokes Pickleball was seriously the most fun thing ever. We have some crazy sleeper agents on the team, with Caroline having an absolutely overpowered serve and Aarushi awakening her deep pickleball skills later in the night. The tension accumulated when Drew and I played Caroline and Nate. We played the first game with my team facing into the wind and lost BADLY to Caroline’s demolishing serve. Drew began to claim that we only lost because of the wind (which, for the record and as a past tennis player, I think Caroline was just good, but who am I to break my teammate’s momentum), and he quickly earned us a rematch on the other side of the court. Maybe Drew was in fact onto something, because despite the rest of the team going crazy to support Caroline and Nate, Drew and I swept with a wonderful score of 11-1. See the video below of the turn of the tide with us winning the second game. In the interest of keeping peace on the team, no tiebreaker was played, and the real winner was our friendship. On the down low, Nate and Caroline, I’m ready for that tiebreaker whenever; just let me know. 

    I also took the cutest photo of Nate rocking Nunu’s sunglasses. Please enjoy.

    After our awesome game, the team rode back to the house in Scott’s huge truck, briefly considered going in the jacuzzi, and finally decided that we had already experienced more than enough fun and joy for the day (it was 11 pm). We turned in with happy stomachs, happy hearts, and happy minds.

    I also want to take a moment to stop and smell the roses. This day was seriously awesome, and also at times sucked. The beauty is that we are doing a crazy hard thing and get to experience the range of emotions and experiences that come with it. I still can’t believe that we are actually BIKING ACROSS THE COUNTRY!! Good thing there are 44 more days of it 🙂

    As part of this blog, I also wanted to add something fun for our loyal readers 🙂 I’m a huge puzzle fan, so I made a crossword for you to solve! Hopefully it is not too difficult, but I will happily Venmo a $5 prize to the first person who emails us at spokes-2026@mit.edu with the correct answers. There are no spaces or punctuation marks in the puzzle. Enjoy 🙂

    Sending my love across the country,

    Tatiana ❤

  • Day 28: Sunrise to Sunset

    Day 28: Sunrise to Sunset

    Marshall, MO to Kansas City, MO — 86.2 mi, 4953 ft

    There’s many things I never thought or cared about before this summer that now, literally makes or breaks my days. This includes how hot it is and at what times of the day, and how windy it is and in what direction that wind comes from.

    We’ve been trying to take this summer day by day so last night we looked at the weather forecast and saw that it is going to be the hottest it has ever been thus far and close to the windiest it’s ever been thus far as well as somehow super hilly again? This surprised most of us because we’d been under the impression that we were done with the Appalachians and were going to be on flat roads until Colorado. Unfortunately, as Carmen and Aarushi drafted up the route as they usually do the night before, our GPS app showed us a very spiky, very hairy up and down graph that no one likes to see.

    Ride with GPS graph, the x-axis is our mileage and the y axis is our elevation. Our route was showing a 5,000 ft elevation gain which we hadn’t seen since Virginia and Kentucky.

    So, this morning I woke up feeling unrested. This is because we slept at 11 PM and woke up at 4 AM in the hopes that we could finish our ride early enough to avoid the peak “feels like 107 degrees” and peak “30 mph crosswind” conditions. Stressed, rushed, tired, and in pitch black, I used my phone flashlight to pack the car with all our luggage. We ate a quick breakfast provided by our wonderful and kind hosts, Shandra and Dave. Then we said our goodbyes which included a very sad goodbye to their puppy, Percy who the whole team agrees is the cutest most lovable dog we’ve met so far.

    And with that, we started our ride at 5:30 AM—despite being 30 minutes late of our goal, it was still a record early departure time for the team. And at first, the ride was feeling great… for the first five minutes. The sun was rising over the landscape and the sky’s horizon was just slightly pink.

    We defaulted into biking in a draft line because, even so early in the morning, we were already feeling some wind. Over the course of the summer, our team has slowly caught onto this cycling technique called drafting. This is when a cyclist rides very closely behind another cyclist to avoid wind resistance and supposedly saves the cyclist that is behind, up to 50% of their energy while maintaining the exact same speed of the person in front. You can expand this into a line as the first person breaks wind, the second person drafts the first person, the third person drafts the second person, and so on (see exhibit A). Usually, when we group ride, it’s either Nate or Drew breaking wind for everyone else because they are bigger and faster so their wind pocket is larger. Today, it was both of them leading the pack as we tried to bike in a double line draft for the first time (see exhibit C). So, it was Nate, Tatiana, then myself in one line and in parallel, it was Drew, Aarushi, then Caroline.

    The thing about drafting is that in order to actually reap the benefits, you have to bike in a very precise and perfect way. Firstly, you have to bike so closely to the person in front of you that you’re afraid of crashing into them and you also have to bike so consistently and in a straight line that the person behind you can easily match pace and follow you. Unsurprisingly, most of us are not perfect cyclists yet. So being third in line, Caroline and I struggled to follow Tatiana and Aarushi as they unconsciously and totally understandably swayed side to side. At our first rest stop at mile 21 we had a brief check-in and decided we should try to switch up the order. I would draft Nate since I had learned to be more consistent after having drafted Nate many times already and Tatiana would draft me. Caroline decided she wanted to stay third in line because she didn’t feel confident to be consistent enough for someone to draft her. At this point, it was getting hotter, hills were getting steeper, and morale was getting lower as the incoming extreme heat and winds were luring closer and closer. Midway through the second 20 mile leg, Tatiana switched places with Aarushi because she felt it was hard to draft me and keep our fast pace. Despite being consistent and straight with my biking, my wind pocket was too small. At this point, our double draft line operation was breaking down along with our mental fortitude. Aarushi and Tatiana rode side by side in an attempt to both catch Drew’s wind pocket? The hills were also becoming more frequent and steep that on each climb, the draft line would break because people climbed at different paces and we would take breaks after each major climb to drink water and wait for everyone to group up again. Before we knew it, our early wakeup time advantage was slipping away from us and everyone was feeling the heat and wind exhaustion.

    We eventually all make it to the second rest stop. Everyone is sad and Tatiana is the saddest. She cries and says that while she wants to bike in the draft line so that she can be faster and make it to our destination early enough, she is really struggling to keep pace. It’s not just her, most of the group is struggling because the pace is faster than usual and tougher than usual. It’s also a lot of mental stress because we are biking in a line that moves so fast we can’t even talk and enjoy each others’ company, so we’re just trying to keep biking fast enough to escape the hotter and hotter weather.

    Everyone takes turns peeing behind this tree. Some of us pulled out our cooling towels which we had yet to try out. Spoiler: they don’t work. And Drew kindly volunteers to go at a slower pace with Tatiana so she can keep drafting him. Nate and I head out first.

    During this third leg, we turn onto a road called Pink Hill Rd. The name was far too literal for my taste. It was literally an asphalt road that was bright red and pink that went on for miles, of just up and down, up and down. I remember Nate telling me a couple weeks ago when we were in Virginia, climbing another up and down up and down, that I just had to look forward to flat flat Missouri. I brought this up to him and called out his lies.

    As we kept biking it felt as if we were biking in and out of pockets of hot hot air. On climbs, it felt especially hot because, as we slowed down going uphill, we no longer had the very slight breeze to cool us down and it felt like literally being enveloped in a huge fuzzy blanket which normally I would love but not in this scenario. Nate and I were not having a good time. As we entered into Kansas City, we’d been so beat down that a train horn going by scared us so badly we jumped out of our bike seats.

    Finally, around 2 PM just a few miles from our destination, a hotel in the middle of the city, we decided to stop at Wendy’s (Nate’s favorite restaurant). Since we were still waiting on the details of checking into the hotel, we decided to get out of the heat and kill some time. It was exactly what we needed.

    Around 3 PM, we got the call from Carmen (our driver for the day) that we could come check into the hotel. We stepped outside Wendy’s and it somehow felt 10 degrees hotter. We met up with Carmen at the hotel and as we walked into the lobby, I’m blasted by the most glorious AC I’ve ever felt. I also felt incredibly out of place as our sweaty stinky selves wheeled our three bikes through this fancy lobby, up the elevator and into our rooms. We then brought up everyone else’s luggage, making a huge ruckus as usual with our seven duffels, seven backpacks, and other miscellaneous items stuffed onto a luggage cart and wheeled up the elevators.

    Once everything was in order, I took the most amazing shower and contemplated never getting out. By now it was around 4 PM and Nate and I decided to watch some TV while waiting for the rest of the group to arrive. Turns out, they had also just stopped at the same Wendy’s we’d been at just a few hours before.

    By around 6 PM, everyone had arrived and settled into our four different rooms. At around 8 PM Carmen messaged that our dinner had just been delivered to our hotel lobby and we shuffled downstairs to eat. It’s BBQ! We stuffed our faces and I felt so happy and full.

    I also found out that Carmen and Caroline had doordashed boba without telling me and demanded that we go back so Nate and I could also get boba. We decided to drive there instead because it would be more fun but didn’t realize we’d be crossing into the Kansas side before we biked across the border which felt a little sad but Nate closed his eyes so it didn’t count. On our way out we saw a beautiful sunset and decided to drive around the city a bit listening to music—my favorite pastime.

    After a long and very tough biking day, I felt like a normal person again. Not worried about heat maps or wind direction, just thinking about our next two days of rest and how we should spend our free time. Amusement park? Escape room? Shopping mall? World cup? Kansas City was our oyster and we were going to make the most of it. Despite the physical and mental lows of the day, it’s making the highs that much higher and I am so so so excited for the next couple of days to loiter and eat food and hangout.

    Love,

    Nunu

  • Day 27: somewhere in between

    Day 27: somewhere in between

    Day 27: somewhere in between

    Columbia, MO to Marshall, MO — 67 mi, 2,432 ft

    Politics can be interesting simply because they are messy. Even Spokes politics.

    People hold conflicting, complicated beliefs that cannot be pruned into a single, clean solution. I find they naturally intersect and overlap and diverge in a tangled mess. And then people grow emotionally attached to the mess, to the point where it hurts to prune.

    — — — —

    We have created a spectrum which is probably more divisive than it is useful. It attempts to describe our methods of biking, how we like to spend our rides. It goes from speed demon on the far left, to extreme sidequester on the far right. I feel we have presented this as binary, either you choose to push yourself, go fast, don’t even take the time to look up at your surroundings, and make it to the hosts house before 6pm. Or you take your time, stop at whatever draws your attention, go at a comfortable pace for your head to always be on a swivel, and arrive late in the evening having had your adventure throughout the day.

    There is a reason why a spectrum has an infinite amount of points to land. Everything is variable. I think our initial intention with creating this spectrum has been overshadowed by the implications of the binary. That’s what I want to rectify through this blog. Just format my thoughts. Show that there’s somewhere in between.

    — — — —

    This morning we woke up to Vince’s amazing breakfast of biscuits, gravy, and watermelon. As soon as Tatiana opened the door to my room, the smell wafted in and encouraged me to finally open my eyes. 

    Vince was such a great host. He was so patient with us when we took ages giving our bikes a deep clean in his front yard. They were covered in mud from yesterday, which we had been too tired to wash off. I was afraid I had damaged my derailleur and brake discs, since us three riders all experienced horrible squeaking, creaking, and scratching from bits of rocks and sand lodged in too many places to count.

    Our ride started back on the Katy trail, which had thankfully dried overnight. Here are some pics of us during the first few miles looking awesome and coordinated.

    Soon after, Caroline and I passed by a cute cafe for bikers with the same millennial vibe I’ve gotten from most coffee shops in the midwest.

    It is here where I make my first decision of the day: to sidequest or not to sidequest.

    My initial thought was to keep biking, because we were less than 10 miles into the 66 we have to finish. But after I physically stopped in the middle of the road, and with a small push from Caroline, we chose to make a detour. The sign for fresh peaches up the road did indeed help me make up my mind.

    Aarushia and Tatiana stopped as well, and then a plan was made. Coffee, then peaches. Amazing.

    Turns out the coffee was mid. We noted that this was yet again similar to a “government operation”, so many people standing around getting nothing done. The same worker was getting our orders and making our coffees one by one, while the four others just stood behind the counter looking forlorn. But the peaches were heavenly. I had to drink the juice to keep it from running down my chin. We noticed an art gallery across from the fruit stand, and so we looked around at some local pieces.

    I felt like a professional dilly dallier, having spent at least 90 minutes off the bike wandering around this cute little neighborhood. After several more minutes of conversations and bathroom breaks thrown in, we were finally ready to finish the ride to the first rest stop.

    When we arrived, I learned that Nate and Nunu had left a few minutes ago but had a long break. To make up for lost time, we decided to make our rest shorter in comparison.

    To me, this is a trade off, and a good one at that. Instead of spending an extra thirty minutes at the rest stop, we just traded it for time wandering about on our own terms. But eventually, there does come a point where the scales will always be unbalanced, where we dilly dally too much and cannot make an even trade. Where we’ll have to sacrifice dilly dally time later in the day to biking. 

    I’d prefer to always have the opportunity to sidequest, not have one part of the day be too sidequest heavy. This, I think, is achieved by being conscious of the time we spend. Efficient dilly dallying. This awareness shouldn’t be suffocating, but just add a level of respect to our drivers and to our hosts.

    We continued along the trail, until I spotted this wooden bridge sticking out of a small pond. To me, it was less about walking on the bridge and more about seeing if I could find a way to get to the end. I did, although possibly without the approval of the Mennonites. 

    First solo sidequest. The rest of the group had gone ahead, and so I, rather ridiculously, pushed 18 mph in order to catch up. I found Tatiana and Aarushi stopped on the side of the road, where Tatiana called out to me to ask if I wanted to go to the casino we just biked by. It was a goal of hers to visit one before the end of the trip, and this was the first one she’s seen on our route.

    Potential third sidequest of the day? All before we were halfway into the ride? I don’t know. I could see this meant a lot to her, and I didn’t want to prevent her from enjoying herself, but I knew that if I went, I’d be itching to get back on the bike. We still had 40 more miles to go. 

    Aarushi ended up going with her instead. While I continued they were busy gambling.

    Tatiana won an impressive 19 cents out of her initial $5, but I’m sure the memories made were priceless. 

    Afterwards, they told me they went to this festival Boonville holds once a year. It was apparently very lit as they got to chat with the locals and learn a little bit about their lives. They got to see a quilting circle, where older folks switch quilts between them and add unique designs every rotation, preserving the memory of each other in their art. They also stopped by a vintage car show and got to sit in the back seat of one.

    Some decisions must be made without all the facts, as they might only become apparent after. Had I known how much of a cultural insight this festival was, I would have taken the time to explore. But that’s not how life works. If I had the same choice between biking or stopping to play some slot machines, I’d choose to bike. And I don’t think this means I’m averse to fun or whimsy, just in the moment, with 40 more miles, the threat of a storm brewing, and the desire to enjoy such a moment outside of my sweaty chamois (allowing that a 19 yr old can gamble), biking through the trees with a cool breeze on my face as I listen to Fleetwood 

    Mac sounded more appealing.

    I eventually finished our ride’s portion on the Katy trail, and then caught up to Caroline, where we attempted to ride like two sardines squished next to each other until an RV decided to nearly ride us off the road with a foot margin between us. We made it to the next rest stop, where Drew was waiting for us with lunch. Caroline and I made our delicious sandwiches with sundried tomatoes, pesto, pickled onions, and some fancy seed bread. 

    We then visited an ice cream shop and, of course in Spokes fashion, split two flavors three ways. I have never shared my food (and saliva) more than on this trip, and realized that for the past nineteen years I’ve been missing out on something. Passing around a drink and sharing that same straw amongst seven people brings you much closer than I thought was possible. 

    Nunu also found some cool glasses in the shop and wanted to show them off.

    Caroline, Nunu, Nate, and I left to bike the last segment of our ride, aiming to beat this oncoming thunderstorm. It was ominously brewing in the sky as we biked through backcountry roads.

    For this half of the ride, I decided to push myself a little. After doing so for a good amount of our  past rides, I was finally feeling more comfortable at a faster pace. But Caroline and I still kept up a good engaging conversation, I was still able to keep my head on a swivel (learning to watch for dogs in Kentucky has truly made this second nature) and take pictures when I felt called to. None of these are mutually exclusive. I find they all add to the experience.

    Nunu and Nate had split off, but three miles to the end Caroline and I caught up with them. I thought maybe they were waiting for us but actually they had just crashed into each other. Nunu hadn’t seen a turn and Nate ran into her, almost payback for the century day when Nunu ran into Nate after he slowed down abruptly to check his Strava. His garmin watch and phone bore most of the damage, both screen protectors shattered. “Now we’re even,” Nunu had said to us, “but he didn’t find that very funny.” I definitely did. Sorry Nate.

    When we made it to our wonderful host’s house, we were met with iced tea provided by Dave and Shandra, and a beautiful doggo named Percy. He really loved Nate.

    While we waited for our remaining team members to arrive, we talked with Dave and Shandra about our journey. To our surprise, Dave had read all of our blogs and even remembered the minute fact that Nunu’s chain had fallen off on the climb into Blacksburg. I’m immediately super impressed. It just goes to show how much of an amazing, invested host he was. 

    We had a great dinner, and they even graciously agreed to provide us breakfast at the ridiculous hour of five in the morning, around when we planned to leave to beat the 95 degree heat…

    — — — —

    Here’s my take: balance is key. Though what that means may change day by day, depending on mileage and elevation gain. Maybe you’d want to go faster to avoid some weather, or go slower throughout a city, or even push yourself while appreciating your surroundings. Maybe you’d want to delay a sidequest so lunch doesn’t get warm, or maybe you’d want to do so because it’s your only chance to. There are multiple solutions that all vary with each situation and with importance to each person.

    Maybe it boils down to consideration. For whom is the question. For myself? For our host? For the driver? For my teammates?

    How do I judge the importance of these factors relative to each other? How should I?

    — — — —

    If any thorns were plucked, I hope it wasn’t too painful.

    Thank you for your time and consideration,

    Carmen

  • Day 25: Unreliable Narrator

    Day 25: Unreliable Narrator

    St. Louis, MO to Hermann, MO — 74.4 mi, 2428 ft

    Today officially marks one third of our trip and the first day I’m feeling like this is normal, like biking 75 miles today is just the thing we do. As the driver yesterday, I was feeling a bit like a chud for missing the team’s first century, especially as they rode into the majestic St. Louis Arch. I looked longingly at my six little cyclists crossing the Mississippi, entering the big Gateway Into the West. It was the first time that being the driver felt unfulfilling instead of a glorious rest day. The switch had finally flipped for me. I had begun to enjoy biking. 

    To be honest, I was never in Spokes for the act of biking itself. Biking is not some all-time favorite activity in the world to the point where I’d want to do it all day every day. Since we’ve all been sharing our reasons on the blog recently, I joined Spokes mainly to meet amazing strangers I would’ve otherwise never met and see parts of middle America I would’ve otherwise never gone to, and hang out every day while doing it. And sure, part of me enjoys a physical challenge; and sure, biking is a cool way to do it. Today we hit the things I love about Spokes, and so I had an amazing day. Perhaps the half of the team whose goal is to bike to the end of the route every day as fast as possible wouldn’t agree with me. But I’m the narrator in this story.

    Today I woke up on the floor in St. Louis after a night of waking up every twenty minutes from Drew’s loud snores in the sleeping bag across from me. Nate had gotten up in the middle of the night to move his sleeping bag in the other room; even their bromance couldn’t will him to stay the night. As everyone started waking up and getting ready, the mood was quite joyful as it usually is in the mornings after biking 100 miles. For breakfast, we feasted on the peaches and cherries I had bought from a farm yesterday as a treat for the bikers. Then we took a 10 minute nap while Caroline posted some blogs. Then we met our host, Alex. We were staying in his second apartment of sorts, and we weren’t able to meet him the night before because we arrived so late, although he had put a delicious homemade pasta shell bake in the fridge for us upon arrival. He came dressed in my favorite biker outfit I’ve seen to date: a biker shorts + biker jersey version of a traditional Oktoberfest lederhosen, complete with adidas sneakers with custom-fitted bike clips. He said he’d take us around St. Louis on our way out of the city, and I already knew he would show us a lit time.

    Pic for reference (Alex not pictured)

    We headed out towards Forest Park, St. Louis’ version of Central Park, where Tatiana managed to run into the one person she knew in all of St. Louis (shoutout Greta) and where we got a mini history lesson of St. Louis courtesy of Alex. St. Louis was the site of the official handover of the Louisiana Purchase from the French to the US in 1803, and served as the starting point of the Lewis and Clark Expedition to explore the new territory in 1804. Combined with its key placement at the junction of America’s two largest rivers, the Mississippi and the Missouri, and the rise of the steamboat and the railroad, it quickly became the “Gateway to the West” (quite literally, with the famous Gateway Arch built in 1965). The city is also notable for hosting both the 1904 World Fair and the 1904 Summer Olympics, both of which happened in the park we were biking through, and both of which were kind of insane events. 

    The 1904 World Fair was held in St. Louis to celebrate the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase, and the 1904 Summer Olympics were held in St. Louis because the city threatened to hold a rivaling international competition in the same timeframe if Chicago didn’t transfer their hosting rights. Let’s discuss the World Fair first. It ran for seven months with a total of 20 million attendees from 62 countries (how did they even get halfway across the world back then??). Important inventions unveiled include the wireless telephone by Alexander Graham Bell, the earliest version of the fax machine by Elisha Gray, the X-ray machine by Wilhelm Conrad Ronteg, the infant incubator (where neonatal babies in rudimentary ICU units were just on display for the fair) by E. M. Bayliss, the personal automobile, Dr. Pepper, and the world’s first “Airship Contest” (nobody won). The fair also had PEOPLE exhibits, where indigenous peoples including Filipino, Tlingit, Patagonian, Ainu, and Mbuti people were just on display in the name of “Anthropology”, along with a full reenactment of the Second Boer War with veterans from the British army against veterans from South African native villages (admission to watch was 25 cents), and a bullfight riot. Hellen Keller gave a lecture at the fair along with J. T. Stinson, who then spoke the famous phrase “an apple a day keeps the doctor away.” And Jack Daniel won the Gold Medal for the finest whiskey in the world.

    The 1904 Olympics were equally weird. This was the first time the Games had been held outside of Europe (the first two Games were awarded to Athens and Paris), and the first time the 3-medal format of gold, silver, and bronze was introduced. The ongoing Russo-Japanese War prevented many top-class athletes from traveling to St. Louis, so only around 10% of the competing athletes came from outside the US and Canada. Highlights include the American gymnast George Eyser, who won six medals despite his left leg being made of wood, and Frank Kugler, who won medals in wrestling, weightlifting, and tug of war (a real Olympic sport from 1900-1920). They also made a hundred indigenous people from across the world who were brought to St. Louis for the World Fair compete in a bunch of sports for the crowd 😭 The craziest event of this all was the 1904 marathon, which “was run during the hottest part of the day [3:00 pm] on dusty country roads with minimal water supply [to conduct research on ‘purposeful dehydration’]; while 32 athletes… competed, only 14 managed to complete the race, which was a bizarre affair due to poor organization and officiating. While Frederick Lorz was greeted as the apparent winner, he was later disqualified as he had hitched a ride in a car for part of the race. The actual winner, Thomas Hicks, was near collapse and hallucinating by the end of the race, a side effect of being administered brandy, raw eggs, and strychnine [rat poison] by his trainers. The fourth-place finished, Andarin Carvajal, took a nap during the race after eating spoiled apples” (Wikipedia). The 1904 marathon Wikipedia page is one of my favorites.

    This mini-history lesson was for my ever-curious mom, who informed me that she would like to hear more about the places we travel through. Back to scheduled programming.

    Listening intently to the history lesson with gorgeous park views

    After our layover in Forest Park, Alex took us to Kaldi’s Coffee, where we ordered four different types of lattes to split and went round-robin style around the table taking a sip of each before passing it on. Drew enjoyed the carrots that came as a side of his kid’s menu grilled cheese and Nunu enjoyed her coffees without worrying about where to poop after. 

    We finally headed out of St. Louis at some late time I can’t remember because I never really check the clock throughout the day, usually relying on my Type A teammates to tell me to get a move on. We sped through West St. Louis through Wash U’s gorgeous campus and mansion-esque estates with perfectly manicured lawns, a direct contrast to the economically depressed post-industrial East St. Louis we had biked through yesterday. Interesting how the Mississippi river segregates the haves and the have-nots…

    The first rest stop was at a butterfly farm (!) with a snow cone truck (!) and a carousel ride (!). I felt like little kids again as we tried it all: we stuffed our face with Cheez-Its before getting snow cones, where Tatiana tried to ditch the snow cone itself and put her mouth straight below the syrup taps, then went to the creepy beetles and tarantulas exhibits where we pressed our faces against the glass to better watch the gross bugs do their gross things. Drew had a tarantula put on his face that we all found the courage to give a little pet to (he was missing his bedmate from Pam’s place). He tried to adopt it but the lady at the front desk had to explain to him that that’s not how museums work. Then when we went to the butterfly greenhouse, Carmen was the one who tried to sneak a butterfly into her pocket to take with her and the disappointed conservatory lady gave her a lecture on ecosystem preservation and even recommended her some books to read. I was the chosen one that a butterfly landed on and stayed for almost five minutes! Usually when I’ve gone to butterfly farms there’s not really a lot of butterflies and they’re all kind of shy and hiding. I’ve never seen so many huge butterflies zipping all around you so fast as I did at Sophia M. Sach’s Butterfly House.

    Pic for reference (Tatiana not pictured)
    Caroline really happy about how stick-like the walking stick looks

    At this point, the team was getting hungry so we decided to have lunch at our very first rest stop for the first time ever, instead of waiting for the second or third like usual. Caroline had the brilliant idea to finally pull out this fat sausage that Ann had donated to our team back in Virginia, which was actually so delicious that everyone on the team went round robin just taking chomps out of it. This lunch was also notable for being the first time we pulled out our plastic cutlery that Theresa had gifted us also back in Virginia; we had previously just been spreading communal guac and hummus with our fingers. Our team was getting a little antsy now because we were only 20 miles in on our 75 mile day and it was already afternoon. But Nate still insisted on our entire team riding the carousel together before we left, even though he was the day’s driver and easily could’ve gone himself after we’d left.

    On the next leg, Caroline suffered some intense elbow pain and unfortunately had to SAG out—her pinky had been numb since the very beginning of the trip and the pain had spread outward up the nerve across the arm. Caroline is one of the people on the team who NEVER complains (even after getting bit by a dog) so if she was finally voicing her pain, I knew it must’ve been really bad. We had finally reached the Katy Trail, a 240-mile rail trail meant for biking across all of Missouri, which we rode until our second rest stop on a pier of the Missouri river. While waiting for us, Caroline had somehow managed to swim the entire width of the Missouri and back (approximately half a mile) in rapid fast current, barely making it upstream with the help of a beaver who pulled along the log she was holding on to for a couple minutes when she was close to shore. Apparently backstroke is good for elbow recovery. I still don’t understand why Caroline and Nate (who went on a 3-mile run) refuse to just take their rest days.

    Pretty soon after we left the second rest stop, we started hearing thunder and seeing lightning. We heard Nunu and Tatiana’s yelps before we actually saw any lightning; both of them are so scared of thunderstorms that they immediately got off their conductive metal bikes and started running the 1.5 mile back to the nearest trailhead rest stop at Augusta, MO, leaving Drew, Carmen, and I to walk their bikes back. The little trail town turned out to be a ghost town with three normal-looking storefronts whose insides were just creepy empty floorboards. Nunu went inside the one labeled “HOSTEL” looking for a bathroom and literally fell a few feet through one of the floorboards; Carmen had to reach her foot down into the pit for her to grab onto to hoist her back up, with Nunu almost pulling off her shorts and leg sleeves. Unable to hold her bladder during the 20 minutes this ordeal took, note that Nunu peed in the pit before getting excavated from the situation. Drew would’ve probably been the better person for this job but he had disappeared deeper into the ghost town in an attempt to hunt down a cheeseburger, following his one-track mind even amidst a thunderstorm. We passed the rest of the time in the rain less eventfully: I listened to Drew’s old piano-playing and airplane-flying videos from high school, while Nunu updated our team’s Instagram and Tatiana read some NYTimes articles. Finally when the lightning stopped, it was too late (past 7 PM) to finish our route and Nate came to SAG us all. We had a delicious pizza dinner courtesy of Philly’s Pizza in Marthasville (one of the best of the trip, and we’ve had a LOT of pizza on this trip) before heading to our Airbnb perfectly along the Katy Trail, kindly donated to us by Kate Engelmann. Notably today was also the day our car’s name finally came to us. The true name of the car will only be known by Spokes 2026 members, but ask me nicely and I’ll reveal its pseudonym. 

    Our view of the abandoned storefronts as we sat sheltered in the rain, and delicious pizza after!

    That’s all for today!

    Aarushi ❤

    PS: There are 15 lies in this blog, can you spot them all?

  • Day 24: 100 Things I Love About Spokes

    Day 24: 100 Things I Love About Spokes

    Murphysboro, IL to St. Louis, MO — 101.1 mi, 2678 ft

    Today is an extraordinarily special day. Today is the day we rode our first-ever century!

    In biker terms, a century means completing a ride over 100 miles. In underexperienced biker terms, this means a little bit of added anxiousness, increased speed, and an earlier start time. 

    In honor of this momentous occasion, and inspired by my elementary school’s “100 Days of School” tradition, I want to share a blog post of 100 Things I Love About Spokes, categorized into items from our century day, general moments, and, of course, the Spokes family.

    Moments From Our Century Day

    1. Having amazing, perfectly cooked eggs and pancakes from Jessica to fuel our century
    2. Petting Jessica’s super cute doggie named Echo in the morning
    3. Finally leaving the house by SEVEN AM for our century, a record start time for the team
    4. Seeing a heron majestically dive over a lake
    5. Drafting in a line with the team and calling each other over the phone to *try* and unsuccessfully play imposter
    1. Appreciating Nate and Drew for switching off which one of them would break the wind for the team and which one would look over their shoulder to make sure everyone was still there
    2. Hitting crazy, insane speeds because we had a tailwind for the first time in forever
    3. Eating amazing candy salad courtesy of Aarushi’s idea that saved the day
    4. Meeting members of St Luke’s Lutheran Church at our first rest stop and taking pictures to include in their monthly newsletter
    5. Eating the yummiest Dairy Queen cookie dough blizzard of all time at our second rest stop
    6. Hanging out in a local coffee shop at our second rest stop and meeting a kind man and his super athletic volleyball-playing daughter
    1. Experiencing the support of our awesome MIT Edgerton Center contact, Marvelin Higginbottom
    2. Experiencing the anti-support of the also probably awesome but unfortunately misaligned MIT auditors who have to review our transactions
    1. Saving the state of my butt and thighs with a beautifully timed application of chamois butter behind a building at our third rest stop
    2. Riding the paved and quite scenic Metro Bike Link Trail into St. Louis
    3. Discussing siblings and hobbies with Caroline, including the awesome question of “what do you think you could talk about forever?”
    4. Resting my eyes under a wonderfully placed tree at the last rest stop of the day
    5. Eating the yummy peaches and Cheezits that Aarushi got for us to fuel the last segment of our ride
    6. Seeing the Gateway Arch in the distance as we rode into St. Louis
    1. Getting kind words of encouragement and curious questions shouted at us by the people of St. Louis
    2. *Safely* but scarily crossing the main bridge into St. Louis with Caroline right next to the cars
    3. Meeting Drew’s dad at the Gateway Arch and telling him about our day
    4. Monumentally taking awesome pictures at the Gateway Arch to commemorate our achievement
    1. Buying ANOTHER postcard (Aarushi already bought me three) because I really liked the designs at the gift shop
    2. Riding around the Gateway Arch on our bikes to see the river views
    3. Finishing the ride with Drew and hearing his happiness from spending time with his dad
    4. Passing through the LGBTQ district of St. Louis and seeing the festivities for Pride Month
    5. Eating yummy lasagna and cookies courtesy of our host, Alexander, and his wife
    6. Having a bed to share instead of stinky sleeping bags
    7. FINISHING 100 MILES IN ONE DAY!!!!!

    General Spokes Moments

    1. Meeting a horse trainer on the side of the road in Kentucky, who told us about her life, horses, and personal reflections on devoting her life to one specific thing
    2. Being exposed to my new all-time favorite breakfast of blueberry French toast bake from Sherri
    3. Sending postcards from every state to my family
    4. Helping determined students finish my workshop and watching them light up with excitement when their circuit works
    5. Submerging myself in any body of water (waterpark… lake… river…)
    6. Playing verbal Connections every day with my boyfriend, Noah, where he patiently reads every word on the screen, and we painstakingly do the Connections without me seeing the words
    7. Wearing my amazing new bib from Pactimo that my wonderful MIT friend, Emma Hopkins, express shipped to me, which has saved my butt and inspired Drew to order the same bib
    8. Starting grateful circles at dinner, where everyone shares one thing they are grateful for
    9. Using laundry loops, which make our laundry extremely efficient, and are a fun part of my nightly routine
    10. Growing in my comfort levels with blood (I am deathly scared of blood) and getting to be helpful when Aarushi and Caroline had cuts
    11. Exploring new Gatorade flavors and solidifying that blue is probably the best, even though in my heart I know it’s actually purple, but the team doesn’t agree with me
    12. Meeting hosts who have been keeping up with our blogs and know a few details from our trip
    13. Guessing the plants we pass as we bike through the Midwest and getting mogged by Drew every time for guessing incorrectly
    14. Putting stickers on my bike from every state we pass
    15. Meeting cute doggies that help us get over our trauma from Kentucky and our nemesis Max
    16. Watching my teammates grow in their confidence as teachers and connect with the students
    17. Listening to a Spotify jam with the team and getting to sing along to the same songs
    18. Unlocking new snacks that the entire team likes and wants to share (we have recently moved away from mangos and have hit fig bars and gummy worms in full force)
    19. Alternating riddles with my dad to pass the time
    20. Watching a student at the correctional facility receive a badge signifying that he was a leader of his classroom
    21. Getting Aarushi to braid my hair every morning
    22. Hearing the awesome and sometimes crazy love stories of our hosts (my favorite question ever)
    23. Watching one of our students promote her FIRST Tech Challenge team at a learning festival, especially since I also participated in the FIRST Robotics Competition
    24. Opening my 75 letters for every day of Spokes from my amazing friends and family
    25. Hearing the employees of Fazoli’s, a restaurant that fed us, share their experiences in the prison system and their heartfelt gratitude that we taught at a correctional facility
    26. Showering. No further explanations.
    27. Sharing deep team debriefs of our families and how we were raised to get to know each other
    28. Getting to start my Garmin at the beginning of every ride and feeling my body get stronger at the uphills
    29. Hearing students excitedly tell me about their plans as engineers and scientists, and even their dreams of attending MIT
    30. Watching the joy of parents and families (including my mom) when they share their love in the comment sections of our blog
    31. Getting a little too familiar with Urgent Cares across the country, but at least we know that we can always receive assistance!
    32. Playing the country game (say a country that starts with the last letter of the country said before it) with Nate and Drew to pass time while in Kentucky territory
    33. Listening to episodes of the “Explained” documentary by Vox on Netflix to learn cool facts and pass the time
    34. Relying on Drew and Carmen to fix my slowly degrading bicycle, which now has several broken parts, but I still love her
    35. Watching teammates do acts of kindness and support each other in tough moments, like Aarushi biking with me when I am seriously exhausted and going slow 
    36. Not pedaling sometimes (oftentimes) on downhills, prompting Nate to ask me if I knew I could in fact pedal (I know, but I like to soak in the views)
    37. Noticing parts of nature and the scenery change as I bike, including new plants, animals, and terrain
    38. Drinking lots of yummy lattes across the country. Coffee is definitely universal!
    39. Asking people in diverse communities deep questions to understand the myriad of perspectives on the world that we get to encounter as we bike
    40. Unlocking more Drew lore, including his insane piano skills, which bring me so much joy every time he plays
    41. Hearing the inspiring biking stories of our Warmshowers hosts, who have often biked far more than us and are way cooler
    42. Gaining true appreciation for a roof over my head and a bed to sleep on
    43. Stuffing my face all day every day, with whatever snacks I want because I burn more calories than I ever have in my life
    44. Experiencing thick Midwestern accents and feeling my own southern slang creep through sometimes
    45. Discussing the World Cup in depth with Caroline, my mom, and my grandfather, even though I have not been keeping up with the games at all
    46. Getting to wake the team up in the morning and put some use to my morning-person abilities
    47. Pretending that I live in different towns with Aarushi and imagining what our lives would be like
    48. Seeing farm equipment that is multiple times larger than I ever imagined being driven by me on the road
    49. Getting to walk through the sanctuaries of the many churches we stay at and experiencing the love and community shared within the walls
    50. Joining the extreme ice-loving group of our team, where we will fill our bottles to the brim with ice before adding water or Gatorade
    51. Successfully moving the team away from fast biking and towards side questing
    52. Hearing friendly honks of encouragement from cars on the road
    53. Having a terrible streak of having to SAG too many people out every time I drive on my assigned driving days, but at least we have SAGed everyone successfully!
    54. Learning about Caroline’s artistic abilities and getting to see her draw in her food journal
    55. Seeing “Welcome” signs as we cross state borders
    56. Calling my family members more often since I am on the bike all day, and getting to hear their stories
    57. Receiving random texts of encouragement from my family and friends, especially when the biking is tough
    58. Never burning because the sun sleeves we wear are awesome
    59. Posting on Strava and getting to see my location actually move west across the map
    60. Receiving the generosity of hundreds of people across America, with restaurants providing free meals, strangers donating cash, and people opening their homes

    Spokes Family

    1. Carmen for always being a rock on our team that is down for anything fun and is seriously here for the love of the game 
    2. Aarushi for sticking by my side when the rides get tough and always agreeing to stop and meet new people
    3. Caroline for engaging in my love for deep conversation and discussing life with me
    4. Nunu for bringing insane amounts of spark and awesome ideas to the team, making sure we always have fun
    5. Drew for being a yapper D1 and always being ready to chat about anything and everything
    6. Nate for having one of the quickest wits I have ever seen, and always looking out for all of the members of the team
    7. Greta and Charles for hopping on a lengthy call with me to discuss my Kentucky fears and try to assuage the dog situation
    8. Sarah and Tian for being our biggest blog supporters and making sure we feel like our blogs are appreciated
    9. All of the Spokes alumni for helping us navigate the dog situation and truly stepping up as our biggest resource
    10. The entire Spokes community of friends and family for helping us navigate this extraordinary adventure and being our biggest fan club along the way

    With centuries full of my love,

    Tatiana ❤

  • Day 23: everything except biking

    Day 23: everything except biking

    Harrisburg, IL to Murphysboro, IL – 52.5 mi, 1406 ft

    Today we woke up at 6am.

    Today we woke up at 6:30am.

    Today we woke up at 7am.

    Ok, yea that one stuck.

    Over the past few days, ever since our rest day + learning festival double day of not biking, the teams’ morning routine has slowly slid from our previously diligent 6am wakeup and 8am leave (“diligent”) to something like today where we woke up a bit before 7am, ate breakfast around 7 (delicious blueberry french toast cooked by one of our lovely hosts Sherie), and then did not leave until 9am. 

    Delicious blueberry french toast casserole vibe with sausage and fruit. Thank you Sherie!

    Having gotten ready before breakfast, I ended up getting back in bed for 30 minutes while waiting for everyone else to get their bags ready – later joined by Drew in our 2-twin-bed room after he got ready. Nunu and I then packed the car as the last few bags trickled in. Finally, after all bags were loaded, tires pumped, sunscreen applied, legs stretched, and complaints about our sore butts complained, we headed off for our relatively short and flat 52 mile ride. 

    Picture with Brad, the second half of our amazing hosts. Sherie and Brad’s story about how they got together is crazy and would require its own blog. They’ve also done their own cross-country bike ride (among other rides) and are super cool.

    Caroline and I ended up pulling ahead within the first few miles (read “speed demons”) and biked together to the first rest stop at mile 17. Along the way we talked about how fit + active her dad Forest is, how her family vacations were always hiking/camping related, and how my family would never survive her camping “vacations”. 

    I also spent the first few miles worried about whether I would have any knee pain flare up since I spent the last 17 miles of yesterday’s ride biking with just one leg after I was forced at gunpoint to do so by absolutely no one. Biking like that puts a lot of strain on your knee but I did so anyway because I’m cool like that. My knees also ended up being perfectly fine, further highlighting the fact that I’m cool like that. 

    We arrived at the first rest stop a couple minutes before Nunu arrived in the minivan, and the rest of the squad pulled up ~10-15 minutes after that. We all quickly devoured the grapes and oranges that Nunu had bought at the store (that were meant for the whole day whoops), and then continued our snack-demolishing reign of terror towards the next rest stop. 

    Caroline and I had left ahead of the other four (Tatiana, Aarushi, Drew, and Carmen) and ended up biking by a thrift store after biking ~5 miles. After a little game of “should we go in, no its ok, well maybe we could…”, we turned back and checked out the store under the guise of looking for Illinois postcards. 

    We found absolutely zero postcards, but we did find an adoption center with baby kittens inside. We ended up playing with the kittens for 20-30 minutes. Many pictures of said kittens are included below for your viewing pleasure. The name of the store/adoption center is “Finding Forever Animal Rescue & Thrift Store” in case anyone reading this is in the Marion, IL area (for some reason?) and wants to adopt. 

    Enjoy the seratonin 🙂 Sorry my leg is in nearly every picture

    Caroline and I then got back on the road for 0.01 miles before we saw (and smelled) a BBQ shop that we also turned around to stop at after the aforementioned game of “should we go in, no its ok, well maybe we could…”. Usually we would never stop this much on a ride, but with a short ride today we figured might as well.

    Inside the BBQ store we found some crazy deals including $19.99 for a rack of ribs (yes per rack, not per pound, we asked) and $7.99/lb pork steaks. I’ve personally been craving ribs all trip, and without my dad nearby to make some of his delectable ribs (seriously, they’re easily the best ribs you’ve ever had), I really wanted to make do here. 

    Unfortunately, despite burning several thousands of calories per day while biking, I don’t have the capability to eat an entire rack of ribs myself. In hindsight, maybe I should’ve spent the school year training for eating instead of biking. In any case, I ended up getting a pork steak and devoured it outside the store caveman style and it was delicious. 

    Some great deals on meat and some not so great angles of me eating the meat.

    Afterwards, Caroline and I biked another whopping 0.05 miles before we stopped at an art store (Little Egypt Art Association) still in search of postcards for the team + now a bathroom. We found out Nunu had already stopped at this store in search of postcards when the store owner, Meliah, let us know that she was surprised by the fact that we were the second people today to ask about Illinois postcards. We didn’t end up getting any postcards but we did get a bathroom break, as well as a picture with Meliah who was super excited to hear about our trip and to brag to her family about how she had met some MIT students.

    It was great to meet you Meliah!

    Meliah also pointed us to her favorite cafe, which was around the block – considering we were already this deep into not biking, we figured why not keep it up. We biked over to the cafe and ordered some drinks and sandwiches, including a lavender lemonade that Meliah recommended to us (and that was super good). 

    Around this time, Caroline and I found out that the other group (Tatiana, Drew, Carmen, and Aarushi) had done the exact same stops as us (adoption center followed by BBQ) just shifted back 30-60 minutes. They also had plans to head over to this cafe, independent of us. Clearly, there is not a single original thought in this team. 

    After a bit of coordination, the whole team decided to cut our upcoming lunch rest stop in favor of all meeting at the cafe for drinks + food. Nunu, who had been on the hunt for Illinois postcards + stickers, had found them and would also meet us there (she actually had already been to this cafe in the morning, but she had no problem coming back for seconds). 

    You’d think we were in Friends the way we all ended up at this cafe.

    After this, we decided that since we were a “biking team” we should actually bike.

    Just kidding, we then went to an antique store down the road and looked around for an hour.

    Simulating how we’re gonna have to drive in the van to the end point since we don’t seem to have any plan to actually bike today.

    Ok then we actually biked. 

    We left the antique store around 3:30pm and rode as a group for 30 minutes before we had to make an emergency bathroom break at a McDonald’s for Tatiana. 

    Us looking really freaking cool.
    Us making sure to spread out as much as possible to make sure no part of the road (road, sidewalk, grass) goes unutilized.
    Drew seeing if he could order and eat a cheeseburger before Tatiana finishes using the restroom. Drew won. 

    Afterwards, we went back to biking. Shortly after, we ran into another aggressive Great Pyrenees! Aggressively cute that is. This one was named Bart and, unlike Max, Bart is a very good dog and did a great job of breaking the bad run with Great Pyrenees that the team has been having lately. Here’s another animal picture montage for your viewing pleasure.

    Bart is huge and we collectively agreed he would destroy Max. Also, both Bart and Echo (see below) were interested in Caroline’s dog bite leg. Not sure what that means but I feel like there’s something interesting going on there.

    After a good 10 minutes of petting Bart, his owner finally got away from us and so we had to start biking again. This time, we actually got into it and had a great draft line going. My favorite time biking is when we go fast as a group so I’m always so happy to break wind for the group so that we can zoom (we hit a avg 18mph pace for the last 20 miles of the ride 😎) (also subtle foreshadowing for tomorrow’s 100 mile ride). 

    We arrived at our Warmshower host Jessica’s place around 6:30pm. We met her dog Echo, learned about how she was a mayor of a city (!?), and absolutely devoured a watermelon. 

    Afterwards, we had a quick team meeting about how our blogs were 6 days behind and are often egregiously late (not mine though, this one was done on time) + how we need to work harder to get them out on time to avoid us working on 2 blogs at a time. We also discussed how we needed to be more disciplined about our morning routine after today’s very slow morning. Finally, we planned for tomorrow’s 100 mile ride (commonly called a
    “century ride” or “century”).

    Afterwards, everyone did some blog grinding – including some blogception of me writing this blog – since everyone except Tatiana had a blog that needed writing.

    Real blog grind hours.

    The last thing we did before heading to bed was make a giant bowl of candy that Aarushi and Nunu called a “candy salad” to fuel us for our century ride tomorrow. Still not really sure what the purpose of it was, it kinda just got the sour dust from the sour candy all over the other non-sour candy and you still just ate each piece of candy individually – but I don’t ask questions, I just work here 🤷‍♂️.

    That’s all for today, wish us luck on our first century ride tomorrow. I mean the ride already happened and it went well so we don’t really need the luck but not sure how to end this blog otherwise. Ok I’ll just stop here.

    – Nate

  • Day 22: A Stench and A Storm

    Day 22: A Stench and A Storm

    Madisonville, KY to Harrisburg, IL — 81.8 mi, 2380 ft

    Crossing the country on a bike is… STINKY. Some things are stinky for obvious reasons. Our clothes, for example, smell absolutely foul after a day of riding. And I often find myself holding my breath as I cross the minefield of deer/armadillo carcasses that make up rural American roads. 

    This morning, however, nobody could seem to figure out why the camping pads smelled like garbage water and spoiled meat. It was bad enough that some of us found ourselves struggling to sleep in the presence of the scent. Aarushi had resorted to rubbing perfume under her nose to sleep last night. Hers was especially bad. I got a whiff of it when I was packing up the camping gear and almost fell over dead. We’ve got to do something about this, but we can’t, because we have a 87 mile day ahead of us. Sooo, back into the camper top they go to keep getting stinkier until we decide to confront this issue.

    Pastor Jon and Life Christian Center left us a plethora of food to pack, and I had an incredible strawberry protein cheerio breakfast. Thank you, Pastor Jon for allowing us to sleep in the church’s gym on such a busy day (Sunday, Father’s Day, Funeral plans, etc.). Spokes is very appreciative of Life Christian Center for the support through the years.

    The ride went as usual in the morning. It rained just a little bit for the first 20-mile stretch. Here’s some pictures.

    On the contrary, I was borderline submerged for the stretch leading into the lunch stop. We were so soaked by the rain that we had to change out of our jerseys out of fear of getting too cold. We all put on rain jackets– I borrowed one from Carmen because I didn’t think to pack one. We ended up having a very diverse array of colors, giving our team a striking resemblance to the Power Rangers.

    We waited for the rain to die back down to a sprinkle and continued onwards, eventually crossing the Ohio river from Kentucky into Illinois. 

    We’d done it.

    We made it out of Kentucky.

    My yelp review of Kentucky is 3 stars. It is a beautiful state, with some incredible people. The kids we taught were extremely talented, and there was certainly no shortage of memorable interactions. However, some of you guys really need to do something about your dogs. Just because your pet timberwolf is named “Sweet Princess” does not mean you should let it roam the streets freely.

    Side note: we reviewed the route midday and found that Spokes 2025 added an unnecessary 7 miles to the route seemingly in order to intersect an ice cream shop. We’re not quite as down bad for ice cream as our predecessors, especially considering the weather conditions, so we decided to divert south, cutting that segment of the route and shortening the day to 81 miles.

    Upon entering Illinois, the sun started seeping through the clouds, illuminating the most beautiful thing I’ve seen all summer: endless, flat land.

    Nate felt particularly inspired by the godrays and cycling-optimal landscape, so he decided to start biking using only one leg to pedal as the other dangled off to the side. I joined and suggested that we finish the final 17 miles of the ride pedaling with just one leg. 

    I tapped out after 6 miles, but he just kept going… and going… and going…

    Why?

    Who knows.

    Perhaps he just wanted to feel victorious.

    Somehow, he did it. I recall hearing him groaning in pain for the last 3 miles to the finish.

    We arrived at the home of Brad and Sherri, where we would be staying for the night. They took good care of us, feeding us incredible chicken burritos and telling funny stories. The night went as usual: we did our chores and went to sleep.

    That’s it for day 22. This blog is shorter as I’m writing it the night before our first century (100-mile bike ride), and I’m trying to actually get 8 hours of sleep– a feat I’ve found pretty challenging this summer. Stay tuned to see how it goes.

    – Drew

  • Day 21: Alternate Reality

    Day 21: Alternate Reality

    6:00 AM

    I wake up to my alarm ringing in my ear and immediately turn to snooze it.

    6:10 AM

    I wake up again 10 minutes later and once AGAIN, press the snooze button.

    6:20 AM

    It rings again and finally, I guiltily roll out of my own personal king size bed and begin my morning routine. I take a quick shower, brush my teeth, change into my biking gear, take out my dried laundry, fold my clothes, pack up all my things that I’d strewn about my room from the past three nights, say a very sad and longing goodbye to my beautiful master bedroom, and head downstairs. To my surprise (my own fault), the house is dead silent. I sent a message to our group chat, “Hi, who is awake?” To which I get no reply.

    7:00 AM

    I go outside to put my things in the car and to my second surprise, the car is missing?? At least from where I’d parked it last night. I hastily sent another message to the group chat, “guys, where is the car?” I finally use my brain and check the garage, where I find the car. 

    7:10 AM

    I then pull the car outside so we can begin loading our luggage where Nate finally appears with his things. I then wonder to myself why no one else other than myself and Nate are ready to go (already an hour and a half after our agreed wakeup time).

    Unfortunately (for us) this morning, Tatiana, our usual wake-up caller, was missing in action because she’d been staying at a hotel nearby with her boyfriend who was visiting. Even so, as I sat in the kitchen eating breakfast, I looked around and I became very puzzled as to why everyone was moving even slower than normal. Something that our warmshowers hosts always comment on when they greet our group in the morning is how we are all obviously NOT morning people (except Tatiana). This was not more obvious than it was this morning. 

    8:00 AM

    The group had finally all stumbled downstairs and it seemed we would be ready to leave soon at last. Just one final step, we all need to load the route onto our bike computers. Suddenly, Aarushi asks aloud, “Where’s my bike computer?” Uh oh.

    8:10 AM

    Everyone is thoroughly checking throughout the house for Aarushi’s bike computer: behind dressers, under beds, in the luggage that had already been neatly packed into the car.

    8:30 AM

    Everyone is still looking and I decide to do some “looking” in my master bedroom, in my bed, under the covers.

    8:45 AM

    I go downstairs and Caroline has just found Aarushi’s bike computer in Aarushi’s backpack! Which Aarushi swears she checked like five times…

    Right before we finally start pedaling, it’s revealed to Tatiana, Nate, and I that while we’d been peacefully sleeping by 10 PM the night before, Aarushi, Carmen, Caroline, and Drew had stayed up until 2 AM! It’s all making sense to me now…

    9:00 AM

    And with that, we were off on our 87 mile day!

    For the first time ever, our entire group of 6 somewhat biked all together for the whole 24.2 miles to our first rest stop. Whenever this happens I always get super excited because it just feels so much cooler. Like, yeah hey we ARE MIT SPOKES! And we bike in a line in our matching jerseys, bikes, and helmets. Today we also passed our first other bikers to which we tried to lock in and look cool for. Today was also going to be one of our last super hilly days as we left the Appalachian mountains so we were going through many PUDS (pointless ups and downs) and took a number of quick breaks at the various peaks.

    Many different photos of us throughout the morning taking short breaks after each hill

    At some point during the bike ride, Nate asks me what day of the week it is. I checked my lockscreen which read, Sunday, June 21st. We realized there were cars parked outside all the churches we biked past and there was a sign that read, Happy Father’s Day! I’d forgotten today was Father’s Day and as we continued to bike, the team members all called their dads.

    1:00 PM

    We all make it 43.1 miles to our second rest stop for lunch! We had an awesome view of a raging river where many people were fishing below us as we sat and ate lunch. This is when Aarushi discovers some funky tan lines that she’d developed from just this morning.

    1:30 PM

    I called my dad and talked with him for 45 ish minutes.

    2:15 PM

    I hang up, look around, and everyone is SLEEPING?! Literally all over this park, a Spokie is sprawled out and unconscious.

    3:00 PM

    Admittedly, I wake up from my own 20 minute nap and Nate and I wonder to each other why everyone but the two of us and Tatiana are still sleeping? How come our team is always napping? Why is everyone so tired? Who is going to be the one to get us going again? How are we only halfway done with the day?

    3:30 PM

    Nate and I have an epiphany. The only people still sleeping are the exact people who stayed up until 2AM. With that, we decide enough is enough and we need to keep biking.

    5:30 PM

    We all arrive at our final rest stop and we take turns peeing in a massive porta potty.

    6:00 PM

    We leave for the last leg of our ride.

    6:30 PM

    We come upon a road closure in the middle of our route but decide to keep pushing through.

    7:00 PM

    Nate and I decide to speed off because sometimes it’s more fun to go fast, especially when you’ve gotten a proper 8 hours of sleep and not 4 hours of sleep. It’s dusk and the landscape looks beautiful.

    8:00 PM

    We meet up with Tatiana and eventually the rest of the team at Fazoli’s for an amazing Italian dinner. Thank you so much Morgan and Eddie for your kindness and support to our team!

    8:45 PM

    We finished the last few miles of our ride to the church in Madisonville where Pastor Jon was waiting to greet us!

    9:15 PM

    We unload our luggage from the car and Nate gives me a boost up to the roof of our car to unload our sleeping bags and pads from our car top storage. Nate tells me he thinks my feet are stinky.

    9:30 PM

    We run a quick shower line.

    10 PM

    We unroll our sleeping bags and sleeping pads to discover that it wasn’t my feet that were stinky (or at least not the only thing), it was our camping gear! For some reason, all our sleeping bags, pillows, and mats smell like old dirty socks…

    10:30 PM

    There’s nothing we can do but try our best to fall asleep, despite the stench, so we can hopefully wake up on time at 6 AM the next morning to do it all over again.

    I tried to write my blog in this time stamped format to illustrate what exactly our day to day routine has become. It’s crazy to think that we are now at a point in the summer that we don’t even remember what day of the week it is. We’re living in a kind of alternate reality bubble that feels very disconnected from the real world at times. And it’s even crazier that we all chose to take an entire two and a half months off from reality, which means inevitably missing major life events of family and friends. At the same time, in our bubble, it feels like we are somehow always busy, moving around, tired, and maybe even a little stressed. Literally from 6 AM to 10 PM every hour is filled with activity.

    Despite all these maybe stressful factors, this summer has already felt like an extremely fulfilling endeavor. Being busy and tired means we have big goals that we are chasing and working hard to achieve. And even though we are living out some alternate reality, we are literally experiencing the real world, pedal by pedal, city by city, and state by state. We are meeting so many wonderful and kind people across the country who have fed us, housed us, talked to us, and cheered us on.

    Even when it takes three hours to leave the house in the morning and the remaining hours of the day just slip by, I am so happy and grateful for the opportunity to spend my days this way for another 54 days. Sorry for always being cheesy but it’s true.

    With love,

    Nunu

  • Day 16: the new normal

    Day 16: the new normal

    London, KY to Liberty, KY – 64.8 mi, 4060 ft

    Last night was probably the worst sleep we’ve gotten during this trip. In an attempt to create “summer vibes”, Drew, Carmen, Nunu, Aarushi, and I all decided to sleep in hammocks in the backyard, as opposed to sleeping on the floor inside or in tents like normal people. Drew slept in the hammock already set up outside on a stand in the backyard. The remaining four of us used two hammocks provided by our (amazing) hosts, Lucy and Steve, as well as two hammocks that we brought on the trip. We promptly realized that the hammocks we brought were both missing enough parts to make them non-functional, and we were only able to make them work by frankensteining parts from the hammocks Lucy and Steve provided us. We strung these four hammocks haphazardly across the pavilion in the backyard, criss-crossing two of the hammocks in order to do the aforementioned frankensteining of hammocks. 

    The four hammocks set up in the pavilion + Drew’s hammock in the foreground. 

    For some reason I ended up taking the bottom, criss-crossed hammock (the pink one). I was the first one to sleep last night so in hindsight I don’t know why I did this but after such a long and stressful day of fighting off dogs along an 80 mile ride, I probably just slept in the first thing I saw. This ended up being a critically bad decision because Nunu, who later went to sleep in the top criss-crossed hammock (the red one), spent the entire night LYING ON MY KNEES. I think I tried adjusting a few times during the night to no success and in the end I was too tired to move. I also suspect this knee sitting situation is a precursor to some incoming knee concerns. 

    Real time picture of my legs getting destroyed by Nunu. 

    In addition to that, all five of us hammock sleepers were all super cold despite (most of us) being in sleeping bags and it only dropping down to 50 degrees that night. Since all of our hammocks were connected by the same ropes (frankenstein is the gift that keeps on giving), anytime one person got up to grab a sleeping bag or a blanket, everyone else experienced intense hammock turbulence. Drew’s hammock was separated but when he woke up in the early morning to grab a blanket, he realized it was wet because of early morning dew. He still slept with it because he was too tired to look for a dry blanket. 

    Meanwhile, Tatiana and Caroline presumably slept well inside on the two available beds. Of course, they are dealing with other issues currently (we think Tatiana sprained her ankle last night and Caroline’s bite mark is glistening in different shades of purple, red, blue, and yellow bruising) so it’s fair to say I’m not envious of their position.

    We woke up at 6am after ~5 hours of sleep. I should point out that our hosts, Lucy and Steve, are amazing and that it was entirely our own hubris of trying to make this hammock situation work that we slept so badly. They had a huge spread of food ready for us for breakfast including donuts, eclairs, pigs in blankets, fruit, juice, eggs, etc. 

    The breakfast spread 😋

    Around now everyone was deciding whether they wanted to bike or not today given the prevalence of aggressive dogs on the route the previous day. Drew, Tatiana, and I, who had biked yesterday, tried to make clear that while we had figured out a strategy to make the situation generally manageable (a combination of yelling and mace), it was by no means a safe environment because of how aggressive the dogs could be. Besides that, biking in these conditions was very mentally taxing from the constant anticipation of a dog sprinting towards you.

    Drew was set on still biking and ended up giving up his driver day to Nunu so that he could bike. Tatiana couldn’t walk so she was out for today. Aarushi decided that she wanted to bike since she hadn’t biked in nearly a week at this point. Carmen said, “I don’t think I’m gonna bike today, I’m not gonna be stupid for no reason”, in reference to not wanting to put herself in the dangerous situation of biking near aggressive dogs. She also biked today. 

    I had to return the small SUV we rented for extra SAG space and for following our riders to help deal with dogs, and exchange it for a larger pickup truck that was actually big enough to provide the extra SAG space we wanted. Our team has two MIT corporate cards that we can use for renting cars, I have one and Caroline has the other one. Caroline doesn’t have a driver’s license. As a result, I had to go drive the car to go exchange it and would miss the first part of the ride. 

    I drove 50 minutes to exchange the car for a huge GMC Sierra, then 30 minutes to meet the team at the first rest stop. Meanwhile, the team finished packing and started the first 20 miles to the first rest stop, which ended up being very uneventful with nearly no dog encounters. 

    The only dog encounter occurred at the first rest stop when some dogs came running down the street from the opposite direction, while I was waiting in the parking lot, just when our bikers pulled into the rest stop. I don’t think they were chasing after our riders though. It seemed like they were just running down the street independently and then decided that antagonizing our riders would be a fun time.

    At the rest stop, I changed into my bike gear and joined the ride for the remaining ~45 miles of the ride. Truthfully, I wasn’t really planning on joining in on the ride at all since I was feeling very mentally drained from the previous days’ events + physically drained from getting some awful sleep. Unfortunately, Tatiana egged me into joining the ride by claiming we didn’t need me to drive the pickup truck since only her left foot was injured and not her right foot (the one you need to drive) so she could drive the pickup truck. So, without really planning to, I ended up biking today. Meanwhile, Tatiana and Caroline drove themselves to the nearest hospital in order to identify the state of Tatiana’s foot + get Caroline her 2nd dose of rabies vaccine. 

    Biking the middle 20 miles ended up being very uneventful, and borderline boring without the “entertainment” of scanning houses for any dogs sprinting at us. 

    At the second rest stop, we ate the usual sandwiches for lunch and then ended up passing out on the grass for an hour. Unsurprisingly, the five of us who passed out at lunch (Drew, Carmen, Aarushi, Nunu, and myself) were also the five who had slept in the hammocks the night before. 

    Napping all over the parking lot and lawn. I don’t know why everyone ended up napping in like 3+ different locations.

    As we slowly started waking up, Nunu introduced Aarushi and I to this game called Rummikub in which she quickly won and then proceeded to essentially play for us afterwards. I’m sure she had a fun time playing. Then, Drew, Nunu, and I played an awful game of HORSE in which we decided we should avoid basketball and stick to biking.

    Who is even the one playing at this point?
    The maximum distance that any of us can make a shot from. 

    After a total of 3.5 hours at the second rest stop, we finally left and continued our biking journey. Around this time, Tatiana had found that her ankle was sprained (after going to three different hospitals because the first one she went to didn’t have an x-ray machine in the entire town). 

    The last leg of the ride ended up being much more eventful, and Carmen and Aarushi got their first taste of dealing with the aggressive dogs Kentucky is known for. I think in total we had ~6-8 dogs chase us, with the most “exciting” breeds being a Rottweiler, two Pyrenees mixes, a Retriever, and a Great Pyrenees that ran between houses across two streets in order to chase us. After we yelled that Great Pyrenees off (probably a co-conspirator with Max, the dog that bit Caroline), a watching neighbor yelled (in a nearly unintelligible Southern accent), “Watch out for that dog, it’ll bit ya”. 

    A pretty view from the last leg of the ride.

    I also noticed some slight knee discomfort during the last leg of this ride, which I found very surprising since I run a lot and that tends to have a much higher impact on your knees than biking. Having seen the rest of the team getting their rides ended by knee issues, the discovery that my knees may not be invincible was quite jarring. Having written this in the future, however, the discomfort has since subsided, and so I have decided to place the blame on Nunu sleeping on my knees. 

    After arriving in Liberty at the church we would be staying at for the night, we were welcomed warmly by Brother Rodger at the Liberty Assembly of God with delicious fried chicken and tons of groceries and food that we were told was all for us. 

    At the same time, Nunu ran our clothes to the local laundromat before it closed so that Drew’s singular pair of bike shorts could be washed before the ride the next day. 

    After dinner, Caroline’s dad and two siblings stopped by to visit. They were originally planning to meet us at Mammoth Cave in a couple of days (on a much shorter bike day) but got the dates wrong. In any case, it was great meeting them. We heard about her dad’s 1000 mile, 10 day bike trip that he did using a single speed bike. Also, when we first met he said, “Ah you’re Nate, you’re the best blogger!”. Forest, if you’re reading this, you’re more than welcome to stop by anytime 🙂

    With people tired and ready to head to bed, we spent a bit of time trying to figure out who would bike the next day. Both Drew and I were physically, but probably more so mentally, drained after the stressful past two days and were both interested in resting the next day. My driver day was tomorrow so I was quite excited to miss the 90 mile ride coming up.

    Carmen, Aarushi, and Nunu were interested in biking, but they hadn’t had much experience with the dogs and wanted one of either Drew or I to join them. Between Drew and I, he was dealing with some chaffing that could use a rest and I had biked a bit less today. In the end, I ended up giving up my driver day to him so that the rest of the team would bike and we could avoid MIT Spokes 2026 from becoming MIT Rims 2026 (everyone driving the route). 

    Side note but since Drew wasn’t biking tomorrow, there was no need for Nunu to miss eating dinner with us to go do laundry. Sorry Nunu 😦 

    For those who have been following along, you may recall that our team has bad luck on my blog days when it comes to SAG outs. Caroline put it best this morning, “Are you blogging today, Nate? Oh no…”. Luckily, it seems to be the case that today breaks the “half the team SAGing out” streak that has come with my blogging days. Maybe just to extend the streak we can count me missing the first 20 miles as a SAG, but that’s kind of a stretch. Alternatively, Tatiana’s driver days have been on the same days as my blog days except for today, so maybe the real bad luck is there? I guess we’ll see in a couple of days.

    – Nate

  • Day 12: Big A(hh) Mountain

    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, so it took us an abnormally long time to get going (yes, even more so than usual). Aarushi volunteered to take charge of breakfast since it was her driving day, so the rest of us focused on getting ready and packing all of our camping equipment we took out as our bedding for the night. I also helped by making eggs again, this time without an absurd amount of bacon grease as I had done the day before — I do think the bacon grease version tasted better, even if it definitely gave us all some heart disease. 

    We set up on our glorious dining table once more with a little more of a rush, trying to finish so quickly so we could hit the road. We had so much food that we couldn’t fit it all in our cooler, so it was also just a lot of us stuffing our faces as much as we could so it wouldn’t go to waste.

    Drew chugging OJ and our breakfast spread

    After saying goodbye to Teresa, who has been such an amazing host and person to us throughout our stay, we took off. Drew and Tatiana had to mail their postcards, so they split off from the rest of us initially. However, pretty early on, we made a wrong turn and had to backtrack, meeting up with them again and climbing up the first (of many) hills of the ride. We split up a bit from there, as I decided to go at a relatively chill pace to prevent my ongoing hand strain from getting worse and biked alone for a bit. There were a lot of dogs that we passed by (ominous foreshadowing) and the weather was beautiful. Watching the movement of clouds became a new way to pass the time.

    Gorgeous first stretch

    I joined back up with Nate, Carmen, and Nunu, before soon arriving at the first rest stop, which were some bleachers by a park. Before leaving together, Nunu had the fun idea of creating a group call so that we could all hear each other during the ride, which lasted approximately 5 whole minutes before it was cut off. I really appreciated Nate relaying upcoming cars after they already passed me (because of the delay lol). 

    The call was helpful though because I realized via the call that Tatiana and I had left our water bottles at the rest stop!! We pulled over to get them back with Drew, and then continued on our way. We soon came onto a gravel trail that had a huge downed tree spanning the entire road. After shuffling our bikes through the tree, we reunited once more with the rest of the crew as we came to the realization that the next part of our route was marked with a scary “Private Property: No Trespassing” sign that halted our progress. This was likely an unintended consequence of a last-minute route change by Aarushi the night before in an effort to cut out some gravel and elevation. We considered backtracking or adjusting the plan since none of us trusted the area (a common theme of the day), but Drew scouted out the area and deemed it reasonable to pass — especially since the route was marked as a state route in our navigation services. We quickly maneuvered around the gate, dashed across the trail, and got out ASAP before anyone could catch us. A bit stressful, but that was just the start.

    Big tree in the path

    Of course, the next road was also an EXTREMELY bumpy gravel section, which was not a fun experience as I had to pee the entire time. The area remained a bit sketchy as well, since we had to navigate some smaller side roads that continued to have a lot of dogs. We made a conscious effort to stick in groups as a result. Over the course of the day, I saw a black lab chase Carmen and a smaller dog run onto the busy road to chase us (foreshadowing again), and we hadn’t even crossed into Kentucky yet where the dogs are supposedly the worst 😨

    Sketch gate and group riding

    Before our lunch stop, Carmen and I took a bathroom break at a very nicely air-conditioned Family Dollar and arrived at the Church later. Lunch was the usual, sandwiches spiced up by the last of our pickles and roasted bell peppers. I really needed to fuel up for the next climb: Big A Mountain (read: Big Ahh Mountain), the namesake of this post. I threw in an extra Uncrustable for energy. 1500 ft elevation gain, 6 miles… I was not looking forward to it. 

    I left with Nate and Carmen, who quickly dropped me as I chugged along the next couple of miles in 1st gear nearly the entire time. It honestly wasn’t as bad as I thought, since it was mostly gradual elevation gain and my body fell into the rhythm of “just keep going.” I forgot who used the analogy of a train chugging along, but I do now understand their pain. Joining back up at the top, the three of us took on some crazyyy downhills to the base of Big A Mountain, filled with scary blind turns and holding onto my brakes for dear life. Although beautiful, the drivers were honestly some of the scariest parts of Spokes so far, especially on the narrow two-lane highways. You never know when they decide to risk their lives and your own by passing into a blind corner, or when they do the opposite and stick behind you for miles, despite waving for them to pass through clearer stretches. 

    After Big A Mountain, it was a net downhill stretch to our final rest stop. Here, I felt like I was in some exotic rainforest instead of middle-of-nowhere Virginia. Lush green ivy-covered trees dominated the landscape, the humid heat was an ever-present sensation, and we could see the towering rainclouds peaking over the tree canopy. I looked at Carmen and said, “I actually hope it rains,” and not even 5 minutes later we feel the heavy drops coming down. Thankfully, our rest stop was a mile away, so we only became mildly soaked and got to watch the downpour from the safety of a convenience store overhang.  Apparently this day is when Spokes 2025 experienced a downpour as well at this approximate point, so we were twinning! We waited for Tatiana and Drew while we finished off our jelly stash. Nunu and Aarushi shared a crazy story about sneaking their way into a concert in the meantime as well. After the rain stopped, we could see the road start steaming, which was also a really cool sight.

    I drafted Nate and Carmen for the last flat stretch before coming to the last 3 climbs of the day, and they sure were something. Where Big A Mountain was a slowburn romance, the final hills were a series of heartbreaks. Once you finished one, there was still more to come, and my legs were not happy with the constant pedaling. Needing to stop more often, I also took some more time to appreciate the view, killing two birds with one stone. 

    Not quite sure about the “Grand Canyon of the East” claim, but Breaks Interstate is beautiful!

    I finally arrived at the campsite where Aarushi and Nunu had amazingly already set up everything (we were worried about rain initially but the timing worked out). 

    Once everyone had arrived, we quickly packed ourselves into the car to drive to Mi Rancho Mexican Bar and Grill, a restaurant in Elkhorn City, KY, that had kindly offered us a free meal on our journey. We were greeted by Taylor, the owner, and were immediately served some of the BEST food we’ve had on this trip. The chicken fajitas were demolished and the lemonade was downed. Thanks again to Mi Rancho for an amazing dinner! 

    Yummy food! Ft. Aarushi shamefully hiding her UC Berkeley shirt
    Our creative solutions to locking all of the bikes together and fitting 7 people into 5 seats

    On our way back, we queued some bangers to listen to, including:

    • Take Me Home, Country Roads
    • Take Me Home, Country Roads (Japanese ver.) (highly recommend everyone listen to once)
    • Fireflies (after we saw some fireflies, of course)
    • Titanium (with Aarushi and Drew’s amazing singing)

    I don’t think I’ve ever listened to Take Me Home, Country Roads more than this summer so far. I think this song will always bring me back to this unique period of time, where suddenly the normal responsibilities of everyday life disappeared and yet new challenges came to be with these special people I get to call my team. Thank you all for making this crazy ride easier with all of your bright personalities and memorable moments. I find myself rambling on these blogs because I truly don’t want to forget every moment, even if they are quite mundane. 

    Anyways, keep an eye out for tomorrow’s blog, which unfortunately was a day I would like to forget a bit more… I think it’ll be an enjoyable read at least.

    See you soon, 

    Caroline