One to Go

Providence is here. In fact, it's been here for the past two days. Orientation has gone on pretty much without a hitch, punctuated by several fun times and one degreasing party. Since we've been here, the unspoken consensus seems to be: congregate in the largest bedroom possible. That just so happens to be Jake and Peter's room. What started as a few people giving their bikes a deep clean quickly turned into roughly a third of the riders knocking at the door asking about degreaser. I enjoyed it immensely; not only did I learn a bit about a few of the riders I hadn't talked to much, I also learned a bit about bike maintanence.

Yesterday we had our shakedown ride, among other things. It was an easy, scenic twenty mile ride around the suburbs of Providence. The bike casualty numbers so far have been two flats, each belonging to Mike and Katie respectively, and my front deflector. I don't miss it much. The whole experience was great, and it really increased a lot of our enthusiasm to start the ride in earnest tomorrow.

Today we had our first build day inside the Providence Habitat's warehouse building wall frames. We made twelve in all, adding to the fourteen that Providence to San Fran made the day before. The results of our combined efforts were a wall frame for each room of the two story duplex. I say our combined efforts, although really we would have been nowhere without the experienced builders that helped us along the way. My group and I worked with Tony, a hilarious native Rhode Islander who proclaimed us "the slacker group". We were the group who finished the most frames. The whole ordeal was a bit spotty a few times, but good humour kept us going, particularly Tony's.

At the moment, we're about to go paint the trailer, something of a bike and build tradition. It's going to be hard to show up last year's paint job; apparantly a lot of last year's riders were art students, or they should be. My own personal suggestion? Just right "Providence to Seattle 2008". No one will ever be the wiser. I'll be sure to post photos as I have them!

The real work starts tomorrow with a forty mile ride across state lines. Yeah, Rhode Island is essentially the size of a large city. It's going to be legendary. Peace out hombres!