andy reagan only the interesting stuff

Yorktown, VA Beach, and 1 day left!

I've had a lot of fun getting ready for Bike and Build and seeing my friends, family, and Lauren for the last time before my trip.

I spent Wednesday and Thursday in Yorktown with Lauren, Friday at Busch Gardens with Lauren and her brother, and came down with my parents to our beach house Saturday, and my friends got here Saturday night.  It was fun going around with Lauren, Busch Gardens was a lot of fun, and the past two nights and hanging out with everybody has been a blast so far.  I've snuck in bike rides pretty much every day, and the weather has been beautiful with the exception of today, which has been raining all day but now I gotta chance to blog!

Yorktown, VA

Spending most of the week at Lauren's house, I got to see most of the town she grew up in.  Like most small towns in America, there isn't a whole lot to do all the time, but I really enjoyed it!  Her house is nice, and the hot tub was great haha.  We got out for 23 miles bike ride (we! Lauren on the 1970's era 10-speed Motobecane) and that was nice, the "tour roads" are a really nice place to get in some bike riding.  We went down to historic Yorktown and saw the sights along the way, she was my tour guide haha, and there's some pictures of what there is to see in Yorktown below.

Yorktown Battlefields, complete with cannon haha

Historic Yorktown haha

The Victory Monument

The York River is bigger than any of the finger lakes...I was amazed by the size of the river haha

There's a cannonball stuck in the wall!!

And the very site of Surrender Field

It's pretty neat that her hometown has so much history, it's probably pretty funny for her to show me around like a tourist haha.

On my bike ride Saturday morning, I met some really cool people too.  I rode for a little while with three older ladies who had biked across the country before, and they were super nice and talked my ear off about bike paths and rides haha.  I think Lauren could've held there pace, but there had the right mindset, it was a beautiful morning for a ride and they were in no hurry!  Later on, I was on my way back, and noticed that my pedaling and clipping/unclipping with my left foot felt strange.  When I stopped to take a picture of the surrender field sign, I looked at my cleat and was missing a screw and it had slid real strange.  A guy on a bike, Matt Kuivinen, asked me if I was OK and I told him I was fine, but showed him how my cleat had messed up.  He suggested the I put it back into the right position and crank it on with the remaining screw, so I did that and it worked well.  Turned out he had all day and was just out for some riding, so we rode back to Yorktown, rode a few laps of some tour roads that made a decent crit course, and turned out that he fixed machines for a living and so he probably had a screw with him! We went back to his car which was on the beach (Yorktown beach) and after 20 minutes of digging through tools and screws, found one that was the right length, diameter, and head! It worked great, and we rode a few more laps and I headed back to Lauren's house.  It was getting hot by the time I got back at noon, and she was still at work, so I cleaned up and got ready for my parents to come.

Busch Gardens!

The Tappans get unlimited passes every year which is pretty sweet, and that actually gets me a discount too so Lauren, her brother and his girlfriend and I went up there Friday.

This was the first ride they took me on haha:

They stop us there at 205ft...I was front row, on the end!!

It's been a long time since I've been there but it was good, the roller coasters were pretty crazy haha.

VA Beach

I reluctantly put my bike back on the rack (I don't trust the rack or my ability to secure it too much haha although it's made it pretty far), and my parents brought me down to VA Beach and we got to go down to the beach and relax for a little while.  Del, D-knick, and Zdan got here late that night (this is Saturday) and we went down to the beach and hung out for the night.  We caught a bunch of sandcrabs, master catcher Delgiudice actually did most of the catching haha, and we didn't get back to the beach house till like 2AM.

The Beach!!!

The Fam

Dad and I

Uncle Carl

Brother

And then I don't even know about this!

Or this haha...

Yesterday (Sunday) we spent all day on the beach, setting up and playing volleyball and going in the ocean, and most of us got some pretty savage burns by the end of the day!

Poor crabs....

Haha...

Brotherman and Lauren looking on

Lauren

'Merica!!

Grades

And in the midst of it all, grades came out!  I finished up better than expected, with an A in syntech, an A in Mass and Energy Balances, a B in Calculus of Several Variables, an A in ES...and a B in Organic Chemistry II, too bad he couldn't bump me up.  That put me at a 3.56 for the semester, pulling my cumulative down to a 3.65 (it's been going down since I got there haha), and I'm really proud of that! My classes were challenging, and with amount of other work I took on....I'm happy.  I got a little worried that I wasn't going to keep a 3.5 overall to apply for a BS/MS program, but no worries there!

I'm a senior!! (92 credits earned)

And Bike and Build is coming right up....I'll be there in less than a day!!!

That's all for now, we're gonna get out of the house.