Teen Treks

Today we officially headed onto the Great Allegheny Pass and biked about 30 miles to the Dravo Cemetery Campground led by Ted and Leo. Cooper started us off by waking us up and getting us moving. Noah served as our safety officer while Dominic gave us moral boosts through out the day. We also got in a great swim break! We were completely overwhelmed by the advice and generosity we received from other cyclists on the trails. We met some friendly locals while Noah, Anshuman, Kai, Ted, and Gabby shopped for our next 3 meals. The five of them cooked up the group spaghetti and meatballs and caprese pasta for dinner. This was aided by a fellow cyclist (shoutout to Hub!!) who lent us his jet boil. He also saw us struggling with our campfire and offered us some birch bark which we all appreciated so much. We are looking forward to another amazing day tomorrow! 

Today started with a dark and gloomy late morning filled with rain. When the rain let up around 10:00, we started to make breakfast. For breakfast we had toasted bagels on the grill and topped them with cream cheese and peanut butter. After breakfast, we got our things together and left the campsite Sprung 11. We biked 6 miles to another town called Edgartown. At Edgartown, we walked around the streets looking at the many shops they had there. From the shops we got some awesome clothes and food. We then made our way to Shop & Stop to get some snacks and lunch. For lunch we had sandwiches with roast beef, turkey, and cheese. After we were all full, we biked over to the beach where there was a bridge that everyone was jumping off of that was called the Jaws Bridge. We jumped off a couple times, then biked and to the final activity of the day: kayaking. We went kayaking in Lake Tashmoo, which was actually a bay, which had a bunch of really cool boats and houses. Once we got far enough out, we are able to stand and so we dug for clams in which we got five. Finally we biked back to camp and started dinner. For dinner we had some really good burgers with bacon and cheese and a couple of us tried the clams! After cleaning up dinner we went to go watch the live band that was playing at the campsite. In the end it was a really great day.

We slept in late this morning to make up for the long day yesterday, and enjoyed the noise of the rain on our cabin roof. But Patrick made sure that we didn’t waste the day by barging accidentally into the wrong cabin and waking everyone in our cabin up! After we all got up, many of us headed to the camp store to check out when they had. Tessa and Elliot took everyone’s laundry and laundered it in the camp’s laundry machines. While our clothes washed, we made calls home to celebrate the halfway mark of our trip. Following our relaxing morning, we all biked a mile into town to a line of shops where we spent an hour and a half buying chains shirts and delicacy desserts.. Some of us even got free bumper stickers because the store clerk felt nice. While some of us finished up shopping, Alex, Will, and Elliot went to buy dinner which was hot dogs on the grill, chips, and pickles! We all tried some of Drew’s hot sauce followed by some chocolate milk. It was really hot. Then we finished the night by going to the big campfire and making s’mores and sharing our ‘hero’s of the day’ at the nightly meeting. Goodnight! 

Day 3: We woke up in Indiana Dunes State Park after a warm night serenaded by screeching owls. The nine of us left early this morning and found beautiful thick forests lining the backroads and neighborhoods to La Porte where we stopped at Kroger for a grocery trip. Early in the day, the group took a break at a basketball court and shot some hoops with the basketball Silas is carrying on the back of his bike. Leaving La Porte, we travelled through quiet roads surrounded by corn fields. The entire day was cool and breezy and made for great biking weather. On the route, we saw lots of wildlife, including deer, rabbits, horses, cows, alpacas, one ferret crossing the road, and one random zebra. The zebra was a representation of the surprise Indiana has given us, it is lush, green and an unexpectedly interesting state to bike through. We’ve got some quirky games going, like a banana being strapped to the bicycle of the person designated as the days “Heath and Safety Manager,” so they can remember their role in the group that day. But most impressively, we have a science experiment going where we are carrying one blue cheese pizza slice in a ziploc bag that was leftover from a dinner in Chicago in which we plan to take all the way to NYC. This experiment started with a joke about a side-by-side taste testing of the two city’s pizzas. Some of the Trekkers are determined to take a bite of the well-travelled pizza on the final day. We’ll see how that goes. The night was called off by changing time zones and gaining more daylight, then settling in at Potato Creek State Park for a night under the stars and laughing at the ridiculousness of weary, delirious bikers next to a fire while consuming way too much Oreos and peanut butter. Not a bad way to kiss a beautiful day goodnight.