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.

Marlinton, WV

Our second day out of Charlottesville, after the extremely hilly ride to Lexington, we crossed into WV and I was on sweep for the day.  Two riders are sweeping every day, I get to do it four times total, and sweep’s job is to ride behind the last riders to make sure that everyone makes it in for the day, carrying an extra tire and lots of encouragement!  This was probably one of the toughest days that we will have, especially to sweep, since people’s legs were dead from the huge day prior and there were some very unrelenting hills.  But my gearing caught up with me a lot, and it was hard to keep a good cadence up some of the grades.  Climbing out of the saddle at 3-5mph slowed my cadence to 30rpm, equal to a full pedalstroke every two seconds (death slow)!

A cool suspension bridge we found on the way

Jolly Jesse again drinking his jar of honey lol when we stopped at that bridge

My fellow sweepers were awesome :)

Still in VA...

Our view from lunch! Kristen and I took a break to let the others go ahead, the view was just awesome

We caught up to the other riders pretty quickly still after our half hour break, probably because of the speed we took some of the climbs at, Kristen was doing awesome.  And there are pictures of us all crossing the border, but it was raining and we were in a hurry so I left my camera covered up haha.  I was worried for awhile that we wouldn’t make it into the host by dinner, it started to rain, and there was supposedly a huge climb left.  When we got to that climb, I went on up (my knees could no longer take the slow hills at low cadence) and it was only a mile! So I came back down, helped the others up as much as I could (gave Heather a push lol) and it started pouring as we made it to the top but it was 5PM and we only had 12 miles left so it was good.

I pulled into town, and when we took a rest at the town sign, a man pulled up in his car and got out with a big camera.  He asked if we were Bike and Build and we told him yes of course, and he wanted to take our picture for the Marlinton town paper! He took our picture there, and went ahead of us into town to take our picture as we rode in.  That was pretty awesome timing.

When we got into town, we celebrated for the camera and were excited to be there….but little did we know that “take a right turn and two-three miles to Mount View church” was going to be so far and up a massive climb…and that last climb was pretty tough after the false finish.  But we made it there, had awesome showers on site, and they had put together one of the best meals yet.  The peanut butter fudge was just awesome, and there was more food than I knew what I could do with.  We ended up taking a lot with us for lunch.

Turns out the pastor was a bass player in their church band, and on our group we have an awesome guitarist (two), a drums players, some great singers and so we went upstairs to the santuary and jammed with the whole group for a few hours.  I got up and sang some gospel songs I knew with everyone, and Will who is our awesome guitarist and singer ended the night to an excellent rendition of Country Roads, it was great.

Summersville, WV

Biking to Summersville was another very hilly day, the third very hilly day in a row and it was beginning to take it’s toll on me as well.  My right knee was occasionally pretty sore when I was pedaling, so I tried hard to keep my cadence up as much as possible up the hills.  There were 5 sizable climbs, the most incredible was a 5 mile uphill, after another decent hill and all false uphill leading to it, and it was pretty brutal.  Up and up we went, to 4,500ft!!  The descent was pretty epic as well, but it was all up and down hills still.  We were on WV-150 which was a scenic parkway for most of it, and it was really nice riding.

Emily and some of the gentle uphill road

We actually climbed above the clouds I think haha, and it was another awesome view

Charleston, WV

Biking into Charleston felt downhill, and although it was 77 miles didn’t seem to take too long at all!  I beat out the massive downpour by all of 10 seconds haha, and I felt great after the day of riding.  Showers were right across the street and I got to take one as soon as I got there, which was reallly nice to clean right up.

Across from our lunch stop, there were all sorts of ducks, rabbits, horses, sheep, dogs...haha

Jean came down from Parkersburg to meet me there, and it was really great seeing her there.  She ate dinner with us and got to meet some of the group, and see us sort of “in-action” which was cool.  My BnB cronies said she enjoyed talking with her, and that was pretty much it for the night there.  Sharif did make a bet that I couldn’t eat the three pounds of spaghetti on my plate, and oh did he lose that lol.

Ice cream!! Got some DQ on the way (choc milkshake of course)

The room that we ate and slept in

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 :-P