andy reagan only the interesting stuff

St. Louis, Missouri!

Yesterday we biked into St. Louis, and it was a pretty awesome day.  I got close to 70 miles on the day, the first half into lunch was country roads and then as we approached the city it got busier.  Highlights included: seeing the arch, crossing into another state, and getting new sandals!

Today we built with Rebuilding Together of St. Louis, and it was great to be able to help out multiple people by improving the conditions that they live in.  Then we got to swim, play basketball, and play table tennis! And I got to talk to Lauren for a while which was good, hope she has fun on her road trip tomorrow.

Looking at the map, we're getting pretty far along!!

We spent the early part of the ride out of Greenville on route 140, which wasn't bad.  It was more cornfields, and there were parts where we could ride close enough to talk which makes the riding go by.  At 10 and 20 miles both we stopped to stretch which was nice, and I pulled lightly into a headwind for the majority of the ride.

Not too long after our second stretch break, my ankle hit my crank again on the right, and it hurt really bad.  It felt weird clipping it out, and sure enough the clip had actually slipped.  So Jesse stopped with me and we moved and re-tightened it and caught up to the others before getting to lunch, which was behind a McDonalds today haha.  The bad part about that was that there was no place for shade to escape the heat or to nap, but we really didn't have time for nap today anyway haha.

Coming into the city was sketchy for a lot of people, but I didn't mind the riding at all! It was kinda exciting, and our stay host here in the gym of UMSL is nice.  We've got table tennis, a pool, the basketball arena, showers and laundry...

Dinner for both nights was absolutely amazing, I'm really running out of words to describe how awesome the trip and the people and food along the way have been.  Christina and Sarah G's parents provided the dinners, and we got to experience some real St. Louis cookin.  Pork steaks the first night were bomb and tonight the spinach salad and just everything was spectacular.

Working today was great, I got to fix up walls and install flooring in the bathroom of a house with Jesse, and it was so hot up there that we couldn't find a dry spot anywhere on our clothes haha.  Not the heat really though, it was the humidity.  Coming back to swim and shower and play basketball and table tennis was great.  I'm ready for the next four days, including a 95 and 106 mile day on our way to Kansas City where we build for two days.  For pictures, I'm working on using flickr and here is the URL for that:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/51163058@N08/sets/72157624262049394/

I didn't really do captions but in reverse order they show the Ohio River, the Arch and the view from that at night (and the ride up it), cool things from downtown that night and today they show some of the roof we put up under a porch.  Check out that board that I cut to fit in the angled space...it fit so tight that it held itself up, boom! And there is a picture of the neighborhood that we were doing the work in, it was rough but I'm glad to be helping where it's really needed.

Rumor is that they next two day, and 160 miles are on gravel...so not looking forward to that part, but at least now I'm expecting gravel trail so when I find pavement I'll be even happier! Better than the opposite haha, that's what I was just telling Jen.  Alyson, one of our fearless leaders, just confirmed the rumor, sorta haha so it should be interesting!

I'm working on getting a better photo system still, leave comments about how this flickr thing works! Here are the very best haha:

Thiiiiick gravel before the bridge

The Mississippi River!!

Get ready Missouri!

The Arch really was awesome

St. Louis by night, from the top of the Arch

The neighborhood we build in, I didn't take too many pictures to not be creepin haha