andy reagan only the interesting stuff

West Virginia: Huntington

** I've moved the first three days into their own posts, but left the starter paragraph

The past few days have been awesome, although I haven't had internet access so I haven't been able to keep up the blog every day, so now I shall attempt to cover four days!! I'm going to try to remember as much as I can, and go in chronological order.  A quick summary would be that we have climbed and descended the Appalachian mountains which has been both challenging and rewarding, I got to see Jean and we ate more, excellent food! I'm still waiting on some pictures that are on other people's cameras too haha, namely at the WV border, the top of Black Mtn...and idk some others lol.

Huntington, WV

Today was the shortest of this whole segment, at 50 miles, and no mountains!  We decided to check out the capital building in Charleston before heading out, but didn't find the downtown.  The capital building is awesome. I definitely ate too much pasta the night before and was feeling a bit sluggish on the ride.  Pix of the capitol:

The memorial

Capitol building from the side

Inside of the memorial was beautiful and sad

Pretty awesome building...

We got free, fresh (watched them bake and glaze) Krispy Kreme donuts, ate three and those slowed me down as well haha.  The riding today seemed to take forever, probably because of the headwind and I was glad to be done with the day.  But it started to turn around when we got to the town, went to a really cool bike shop, and got to take a *free* cooking lesson in Jamie Oliver's food revolution kitchen!! We stopped there at 1:30, and they had two spots open at 2! We told them about Bike and Build (we were still pretty sweaty) and normally they ask for $10 to cover the food (all top-quality) and the lesson but then the other people came in for the lesson and they were like "OMG we saw you guys on TV!!" and we felt famous and they told us we didn't need to pay when we were leaving! We learned how to make four different dressings (not hard!), a different potato salad (delicious) and learned how to make a cucumber salad and actually all got to make one! It was all so good, although our vegan-edition was a little too tart for my taste haha.

It looked modest outside

It was super nice inside, all stainless and awesome

Jesse and Scott with their salads

And then we ate dinner donated by Jimmy Johns (free food galore...) which was good, and we went out to check out the town and I called and talked to Lauren on our 9th month!! After people got ice cream and books haha and I had talked to Lauren we went over to a park which was really nice.

Really nice fountain at the entrance, relieving after walking through some less than wealthy neighborhoods to get there

I played with some kids there haha

And we found they had a nice rose garden, I love this pic

Love this pic too, so pretty haha

Annnd we walked back to the church and I've spend an hour trying to organize photos and differentiate all that I've done for the past for days! Haha I hope you enjoyed reading, tomorrow we head to Ohio!  There are too many smaller little anecdotes than I can remember or put down now, hopefully I won't go another three days without internet haha