<3 Ohio

So Ohio is probably my favorite state so far, because the hills are a joke. Today most of us laughed when we read the cue sheet and discovered the ride was only forty two miles and the tallest climb was only three hundred feet. We were doing double that mileage and climbing mountains back in New England. The ride was made even cushier by the fact that I was riding sweep.

For those of you reading who aren't riding across the continent advocating affordable housing, riding sweep is essentially a license to ride as slow as you want. Sweep's job is to ride behind all the other riders and make sure that everyone is accounted for at the end of the ride. I was considering going to a theater with my partner in crime Hana Kawai, who I codenamed Mama Sweep, and then sprinting all of the forty miles to the site. Instead, we chose a leisurely pace and had second breakfast at a Macdonald's. It was a fun time, especially since we got homemade cookies from the group of cool old dudes we met there.

Even with all of our pit-stops, which included several gas stations and the hunt for an elusive lake-beach, we still made it to the church well in advance. What could have been an uneventful ride was made somewhat more interesting by playing various games, among them, bike tag. This is of course the same as regular tag, only on a bike on a highway, and consequently considerably more dangerous. Yeah, it's a lot of fun. I plan on popularizing bike frisbee when we get into the Great Plains. We also had a lot of time to discuss the subtle ways in which the trip was changing us.

I've commented on how we live a very insular existence. It's true; I know already that there are things I can't convey to people outside the trip. For example, I don't think any one of us will ever be able to drive down a road without wondering how it would feel to bike down it. The rest of them are all little joys or stresses that are so commonplace on the road; knowing there's a looming hill ahead of us, or tearing into that first bite of church dinner after riding seventy miles to get there. For sure, this is an experience unto itself that I will miss profoundly.

On the somewhat more introspective note, the last few days I've been riding alone a little bit. It's been different, but enjoyable in its own way. Earlier in the trip I was pretty adamant about riding with a group, mostly for safety, but also for conversation and all that. Riding alone causes you to reflect a lot more on the enormity of what you're actually doing. It wasn't until yesterday, crossing into Ohio from Pennsylvania, that I realized that I was moving across the entire North American continent under my own power. My own legs are bringing me from the Atlantic to the Pacific. And that is insane. I've found it's easy to forget the scope of our trip because we get mired in the day to day. You tend to forget about the hundreds of miles that you've already ridden to get to this moment. You either forget or never realize the gains in strength those miles gave you.

I couldn't wipe the smile off my face yesterday, remembering how much I had wanted this and truly understanding how much I really love it. It's hard, possibly the hardest thing I will ever do. But then I remember how I felt about the mountains that we climbed back in New York, remembered how impossible they felt when I was already so tired from climbing the last. But we climbed them and we're stronger for it, such that everything in front of us seems possible, seems easy. Sometimes the ride is a chore, but at present, it's bliss. I can't wait for some dramatically changing scenery out west and to finally dip my front wheel into the Puget Sound.