General updates
Moving in and Week 1
Aug 28th
So I never really got a chance to finish this post…but moving in was good (a lot of work), my classes are great, I’m loving it as a math major and have research coming up soon at the VBI, and just celebrated my one year anniversary with Lauren last night! This coming weekend I plan to compete in VT’s home MTB race, and since my bike has been broken I’ve been running and swimming a fair amount…and am looking at triathlons but who knows if I’ll do one haha.
Driving down/day 1 (8/19)
Lauren and I made good time on our way down last Thursday, getting to my house in 9.5 hours with stops. We had just missed Dave, but James was there to let me in and give me a key. First walking through the house was really weird, because it was so moved in to and foreign. The front yard was sprawled with scrap wood and the fridge was full of random food, and all that was in my room was the mattress and some of James and Daves stuff. After moving my stuff in from her car, into a pile in the corner, we went to Mike’s for dinner and then to Mary Kates for my car and things I had stored there.
My car was still stuffed full to the roof, and we put some things in Laurens car so I could make just one more trip…so much stuff! After letting my car run for a minute, it began to rev from 1k to 2k rpm in idle…not good. I was going to try to drive it home still, worried though, and told Mary Kate that I would call her when I got home to let her know I made it. The way home was scary, the car creaking, revving in idle, and complaining in general after a summer of neglect. To my relief, we made it up the hill up Harding to my house, I was bummed that the car was not working though. Lauren and I were both tired from all day driving, and I unloaded my car the remaining floorspace in my room and went to bed not long after, having bought new sheets at Target on the way there.
Friday, day 2 moving in
In the morning I went with Lauren to help her move in, and we got checked in to The Village. It was amazing how different her living situation is…its so clean and new, she had brand new carpet and all the furniture is from like target haha not the home depot scrap lumber bin. She was the first there, and after a little bit her parents got there and I helped to move all her things in. One by one the roommates were showing up and I helped moved them in as much as I could. After a little while she took me back home and I started to move stuff into my place.
Since the car was still running weird, I went to advance auto parts to pick up oil and an air filter to change those. The guy there said that he thought the car just needed to be opened up and driven. To get the last of my stuff (chair, TV, speakers) and drive the car, I headed to Mary Kates and on the way there drove the car hard across Lusters Gate Rd. After loading it up, on the way back it was no longer revving by hovering near 1100 rpm shakily. Up harding though, the check engine light came on and I thought I had killed it haha. Back at Advance, they read it with their computer and the code said I needed a new Idle Air Controller. That make perfect sense, bc the only time it was having trouble was idling. The part was $200 but I needed it, so I ordered it and it was supposed to come in on Wed. Good news was that I now knew what was wrong and driving the car wasn’t going to hurt it.
Back at the house, I unloaded the car and now all of my stuff was in my room…in piles around the mattress haha it was a mess with no desk or storage at all yet. After that I went out for dinner with Laurens roommates and her parents who treated us to Red Robin and it was really good. Got a chili burger that I had to eat with a fork and a bottomless root beer float!
Saturday: Burke’s Garden Century and Day 3, shelf building
I got up super early in the morning and rode with Greg to a flat century that’s been going on for a few years now, about 30 minutes away as a get away from all of the campus traffic. Long story short, I finished the century in just over 5 hours, at an average pace of 19.9 MPH! It wasn’t entirely flat, there was one climb that we did both sides of, but 80 miles were at less than 1% grade haha. Going out, I thought that Greg and I were with the fast group when we broke away from them 20 miles in, until we got caught by Justin C and John Delong’s four hour group! They smoked by us, and I actually got caught up in their paceline and did a few pulls at 27-28MPH …and was recovering from that for the rest of the day. With stops, I got back to my house at 2PM and showered and took a nap haha. Then I spent the rest of day trying to get some shelves built so I could start to unpack.
Portland with Mom and being HOME
Aug 9th
After celebrating our arrival at the Pacific on the 31st, my Mom and I spent the morning in Cannon Beach exploring the beach with Becky and Sonya and Olivia before heading back to Portland. We took Jesse, Alyson and Sarah W back to Portland with us, and everybody went to Noah’s house. From there, we packed up bikes (I completely dissambled mine part by part because I’m crazy haha) and said goodbyes. After checking in to the hotel, my Mom and I got pizza at this cool little place with tables on the ceiling and then I got to sleep in a bed for the night.
We spent the next day exploring Portland on a tandem bike that we rented which was a lot of fun. We also got to meet up with all the Bike and Builders again which was cool. We went up to the Rose Garden in the hills above Portland which was nice too.
We got around so quick on the bike that we had seen pretty much all of downtown Portland we wanted to haha, and the next day drove out the scenic Columbia River Gorge and did some hiking amongst the waterfalls. For dinner we went down to Hood River to a brewery and watched the windsurfers before heading back to catch the plane. A nice two days, but I was ready to get home after the whole summer!
Powell's Books, in d'town Portland is a full city block and four stories tall, the largest independent bookstore in the world!!
Hhahaha
Roses!
Voodoo donuts!
In front of Haystack Rock on the beach
At low tide, all the sea life on the rock was super cool
Sea anemone!
And breakfast that morning haha, it was picture worthy I must've thought
One of the highest waterfalls in the country I think, if not the tallest
The water was covered with wind surfers and kite boarders, and I heard one of them comment how few people were out then!!
Rock Bottom Brewery sampler!
Riding the tandem 
Home
I haven’t done too much since I’ve been home, my days have pretty much went like this: wake up at noon, eat some breakfast my brother made and then go for a bike ride. Come back to dinner my Mom made for me, then a few hour nap in the hammock and reading my book before friends come over and we drink some beers around a my expert bonfires haha. It’s the life. My first day back, I went for a 44 mile ride and climbed every big hill in the area including Churchill road going around Otisco Lake, and it is steeper than anything we climbed this summer! I went down Munro (and back up) to see how fast I could get, but only a disappointing 54mph… And then Friday my ride was short, with the skin suit and I just put in some TT efforts in the bars to prepare to the Great Race this Sunday.
Yorktown, VA Beach, and 1 day left!
May 17th
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.