The day out of Madison, I made it about 45 miles before my knees gave out the first time.  I spent the rest of that long, hilly day in the van.  About every 2 days for a week after that, I would ride about 40 miles before my knees would give out again.  The fourth time this happened was our ride into Devils Lake, North Dakota.  I had been feeling amazing that morning and was sure I would finish our longest ride yet.  By mile 20, the pain was unbearable.  I knew I had to see a doctor, so I made the push to Aurora Urgent Care in South Grand Forks, North Dakota and was told I had tendonitis and would need to spend a minimum of a week in the van.

I behaved well, followed the doctors orders, and rested up – but the pain got worse.  By the fourth or fifth day of the week, I realized that it wasn’t going to get any better.  I had to make a very, very difficult decision.  I would, in fact, rather climb Bethel Mountain 8 more times in a row than have to face a decision like this one again.  I had to choose between staying with my teammates but riding in the van every day or going home and resting up.  I did not sign up for Bike and Build with the intention of sitting in the van.  I signed up to bike across the country and build some houses.  Since I was unable to accomplish the former, I decided I would take… a short break.

My teammates were amazing throughout the entire thing.  I felt (and still feel, honestly) horrible about going home.  It was the last thing I wanted to do, and it definitely validated that many times the right decision is not the easiest or most fun.  My teammates supported me the whole way, and were just so incredibly amazing.  Special shoutouts to Cydney and Rachel H. for your words of encouragement and support and to Will, Angel, and Kelsey for your delicious snacks.  Thanks to you I never even had to visit the dining car.  All 29 of my teammates came to the Wolf Point train station to see me off.  I got hugs and applause and tons of encouragement, and it was something of a “high” for me, seeing how close we’ve all gotten.  Finally, at about 5:30 on Wednesday afternoon, the doors to the 28 Empire Builder closed on 20-odd amazing people waving me off home.  Leaving was probably one of the toughest things I’ve ever done.

Thursday I arrived in Columbus, Wisconsin.  Thursday is also the day that we hold our “family meetings”, where we discuss highs, lows, and issues for the team that week.  I had the privilege of telecommuting to our family meeting and listened as people passed the phone around and shared their highs and lows with me as well as the rest of the group.  I can’t express how touching the whole thing was.

Today, Friday, I went to the doctor.  My doctor gave me the somewhat bittersweet news that while too much activity would not be good for my knees, too little is also not a good thing, which is probably why it got worse.  It turns out that sitting in the van doing nothing was probably not the best thing for me and may have caused the problem to escalate.  However, she also said that biking 70 miles a day was probably not a realistic aspiration in the immediate future… maybe 10 miles a day.  Maybe.  I didn’t sign up to bike 10 miles a day, and so, ultimately, I think that the decision to go home was indeed the right one, if not the easiest or choicest.

But the title of this post is “It’s just a break.”  I WILL bike from Madison, WI to Vancouver, BC one day.  Whether it will be this year or next year or after I graduate is the question… but I made a commitment to my donors and my teammates to bicycle 4000 miles for affordable housing, and I will make it happen… so this is truly just a break.  I am not quitting.

Unfortunately, this appears to be all that North Dakota has to boast.  We’ll find out today – we’re headed to Minot, ND, where we will have our second day off.  We will be arriving just in time for the last day of the North Dakota state fair, and several of us plan to raise rabble at attend this most propitious event.

Pictures – not too many this time…

July 27 – July 31

Since little of importance has gone on recently, I shall tell you all about prom!  Prom is a Bike and Build tradition and will be taking place in Rugby, ND – tomorrow.  The theme will be “Famous Duos”, and I have an excellent idea for a costume, but no one to go with as of this moment.

Bike and Build has an odd way of distorting our perception of time.  Madison feels like a long damn time ago, as opposed to being less than two weeks ago.  Our first ride day feels like it was years and years ago.  I have no idea why this is, but thought I’d bring it up in case your favorite person on this trip has contacted you and asked more than once what day of the month and/or week it is.  We don’t really know anymore, all we know is The Day We Were In ______________.  Things we did this morning feel like they were three weeks ago.  I often have to think for a few minutes about where we were yesterday.  It’s hard to tell how long I’ve been riding in a day because it’s all just a blur.  Either the wind is at our back, the sun is shining, and the miles are easy, or (as it is right now) we can push and push and push and look at our cyclocomputers only to see that since we last looked, only a mile or two has passed.  /randomthoughts

In other news, Minnesota is gorgeous and has awesome bike paths.  Our ride into Sandstone was largely on a paved bike path, and our ride into Duluth was almost entirely on a paved bike path – about 50 or so miles of it, and the path we were on (the Willard Munger bike path, in case anyone is interested) appears to stretch over 120 miles across Minnesota.  Very cool stuff, other states ought to take a hint from this.

We spent two nights in Duluth at Temple Israel Reform, who served us some excellent kosher hot dogs and hamburgers for Friday night dinner.  They also hooked us up with free tickets to a Duluth Huskies game, which several of us attended and very much enjoyed.  The Huskies lost, by the way.  Oh well…

We spent our build day in Duluth putting trusses on a house and digging a hole around said house.  By the end of the day, a house that had been simply a box with an open top turned into a house with all its trusses on, much of the roof covering attached, and plywood and foam laid around its perimeter (for reasons which were never made clear to me, but hey, I’m sure they were good ones).  For lunch, we were treated to a carnival (including hamburgers, hot dogs, sno cones, a bouncy castle, and a dunk tank) by our good friend Daryl from the build site.  Woot!

Pictures – WARNING: Naughty words occur herein.  If your tender eyes cannot handle certain four-letter expletives, don’t look at the pictures!

July 20 – July 26

Our two nights in St. Paul are homestays, which means that some very kind/adventurous/awesome folk volunteer their homes and their beds to individual Bike and Build members.  Abby and I are staying with Rachel and Jim, and it’s been awesome.  Not only were we treated to real beds with actual pillows, but this morning Rachel made us some INCREDIBLE stuffed challah french toast and breakfast sausages.  We then went for a ride around town to a bike shop called Grand Performance, a yarn store called The Yarnery, and some little shops inside a mini-mall, The Bead Monkey and Ten Thousand Villages, a fair trade shop.  Rachel also treated us to soft tacos from Chipotle, a first for Abby and I.  At this moment, we are getting our laundry done and listening to a thunderstorm outside as I type this.

Cheers, NUS 09. Within 400 miles of the halfway point and our first well deserved day off.  On to the next.

Immediately after lunch we located a field containing those rolled up haybales featured in “Bodies in Motion” (see my Videos section) and so we had to stop for pictures.  See photo dump below for the awesome.  Not long after THAT we found this crazy rock/sculpture garden in Cochrane and again we just HAD to stop for pictures.  Featured in this picture dump will be photographs of me riding a triceratops.  Because, you know, when the Earth was created 6000 years ago, humans rode dinosaurs.  According to Ken Ham anyway.

Tonight we will be staying in Pepin, the birthplace of Laura Ingalls Wilder.  It’s a very cute little town and we even managed to get HOT SHOWERS!!  Yay!

PHOTO DUMP!  Finally!

July 14 – July 18

July 19 – July 20

Mommy Rachel: Yay!  I’ve never been to Wisconsin!
Me: We have cows!
MR: Moo!
Me: And beer!
MR: Beer!
Me: And cheese!
MR: CHEESE!

And so the day went.  My family was at the church in Janesville waiting for me to get in, and the twins were even prepared to skip their softball game so we could all have dinner (provided by the Kolstes, thank you so much, everything was EXCELLENT) and go to Frostie Freeze (a local and delicious ice cream place) together.  The following day was a build day, and the crew of which I was a part worked with a local group called Community Action to put up insulation in a house they were building.  We managed to insulate all of the exterior walls and put up the plastic on three of those walls.  All in all, a good day’s work.

After a month, I was ready to go home and see the family.  Luckily, July 16 was the day we were scheduled to ride into Madison, where we would spend one day biking and one day building.  I spent the day after our short 40 mile ride in with Mommy and the evening with the family, and a good time was had by all.  I’m told everyone else went to the Memorial Union Terrace as well as to go see Harry Potter and it sounds like everyone had a good time.  We then had another build day, where we worked in the same neighborhood as where I did my sweat equity.  We got lots of stuff done, including putting up the plywood on the roof and installing posts on a porch (more time consuming than you’d think!) Again, I spent the evening with my family as it was Sammie and Kenzie’s birthday!  We went to the Nitty Gritty for dinner and saw Harry Potter.  Sidenote – it was really quite good but SPOILER included a scene that never appeared in the book, added nothing to the story, and will likely complicate things for the next movie END SPOILER

Today, we are in Gays Mills, and I have to begin this bit of my post with a Mad Props(TM) to Lil’ Sidny.  It was cold, windy, hilly, all around nasty, and my knees plain gave out at mile 46, which meant I had to finish the day in the van.  When we drove past Sidny, she goes BEST DAY EVER!  Amazing.  Sidny, I am in awe of your awesome attitude.  Well done.  Several people had to be picked up at the end of the day and others are still not in as of almost 7:00 pm. It was set to be a 101 mile day, but was nowhere near as easy as Chicago.  Oh well, all in the adventure.

The skyline wasn’t the only thing to greet us, though.  About a half mile after I hit my century, I cruised around a corner to cries of “WOOO BIKE AND BUILD!” from two people who turned out to be none other than Craig Lee and Kathy Hill of NUS08, whose blogs were essentially the reason I’m on this trip at all.  Kathy and Craig had cupcakes and frosting for us and were nice enough to take some pictures of us in front of the skyline.  They also rode with us from Chicago to Grayslake today.  Guys, it was really cool meeting you.  Thanks for riding with us.

From there, it was another 12 miles or so along the Lakefront bike path to St Paul’s United Church of Christ, our destination for the evening.  Dinner was not provided and so we were free to explore the area and find dinner for ourselves.  Myself, Silky, Lauren, and Julia all went to a pub called O’Malley’s for an amazing (and cheap!) dinner.  All in all, a great way to end a great day.

Today was supposed to be a 44 mile day but wound up being 57 miles due to 10 miles spent putzing around Chicago all morning (super fun) and 3 miles of getting lost along scary roads with scary drivers (not so fun).  This morning we rode out to Millennium Park with Craig, Kathy, and Dan (a NUS08 leader), followed by Wrigley Field for pictures.  You can check those out in the photo dump below.  Despite getting lost several times and being one of the slowest riders in the group, I was the first one to the church today by about 30 seconds.  Awesome.

For dinner we’ve just had sweet ‘n’ sour chicken and peppersteak over rice with fruit salad and cucumber salad and normal salad, followed by ice cream sundaes.  Mmmmmmm.  It is now midnight and I’ve just gotten back from doing laundry, which involved finding a closed laundromat and then having to drive 20 minutes away to find one that was still open.  At least laundry got done.

PHOTODUMP!

July 5 – July 7

July 8 – July 9

July 10 – July 13

Since my last post, we’ve been through Pennsylvania and Ohio.  I am writing to you from 4 miles over the Michigan state line in the lovely small town of Camden.  From what I can tell, these fine folks have hosted Bike and Build before (their photo board has a picture of Isaiah “Farm Kid” Berg from last year, for my NUS08 readers) and they’re very nice.  We’ve had showers right next door in the pastor’s house, REAL towels, wifi, and of course they’re about to feed us a huge meal.

I must make a short comment on the roads on which we’ve ridden the past several days.  I noted that NUS08 spent a lot of time on US 20 in Ohio.  We did not.  Thank FSM.  That is all.  Ohio in general needs to fix its roads.  They are often not fun to ride upon, but approximately 20 miles of US-20 was more than enough for me.  Thanks but no thanks.

Now, today I managed to break 1000 miles, and so I made this short video for y’all to watch!

It turns out that the road I took, Old Lakeshore was just parallel to Route 5, but closer to Lake Erie.  As in, right on the water.  It was gorgeous, and a local suggested that I probably also was spared the worst of the wind for that portion of the ride.  Yes, we had an EPIC headwind today, all due to the lake.

Earlier on in the trip, I was joined by a local by the name of Rick.  He was very nice and was kind enough to escort me through the bad parts of Buffalo.  Rick, if you’re reading this, thanks again and I hope you’ll continue to read my blog throughout our trip.

Yesterday was of course our trip to Niagara Falls.  It was really cool to go into Canada (a first for me) and see the falls, but the ride in somewhat ruined the experience for me.  It wasn’t the bicycling as much as the depressing state of the town of Niagara Falls.  If you’ve ever been to Wisconsin Dells and had to go find groceries, you’ll understand what I’m talking about.

The Canadian side was equally like the Dells in that everything was sparkly and lit up and shiny and touristy.  We had fun though, went for coffee in the morning and food at Dave and Buster’s, where Jules had two gigantic Molsons at 11 am.  We then spent several hours chilling around the falls, even having a nap right in the middle of a grassy area in the middle of everything.  That was a comfy frickin’ nap.  We ended the day with some excellent (but kind of expensive) Indian food, since that’s about all there is on the American side, and of course the ever-present ice cream.  Yummy.

Right now, everyone is off to go see fireworks, because apparently today celebrates the birth of the United States.  Or something.  So we blow stuff up.  Anyway, I opted not to go as I’m a bit tired.  Instead, I’m here being serenaded by Lauren on the guitar – Dad, she’d give you a run for your money, I have to say.

More pictures!

July 3 – July 4