June 18th-On our 5th day, we rode through NY and saw this sign outside a deli in a tiny town. We figure our spirit and Sarah’s were equally youthful and entrepreneurial, except we spend money and have no computer to create advertising documents. We rode 92 miles on this day. 87 miles into our journey, Andrew’s spoke broke. We had a cassette tool and a gain whip to take off his cassette, but our crescent wrench was too small, so we flagged down every car we saw—in the middle of nowhere—to ask for a crescent wrench. One car went back for the park ranger; he didn’t have a wrench, but a different ranger did, so he sent for him. The second ranger came, we fixed our spoke, and he escorted us through the dark to the campsite at the Delaware Water Gap. We saw a baby black bear on the way, so we stopped and told the ranger, and he said, “Oh, cool,” and got back into his truck. He let us camp for free.

June 17th-We rode 77 miles from the misty morning in Pleasant Valley CT, through rain until noon, over the border after Matt got three flat tires, into a motel in Poughkeepsie for the night.

June 16th-On our third day, as we topped another of Connecticut’s giant hills, we saw this sign and chuckled because New England is the only area we have visited with the ability to be so blunt in pointing out the two things that hurt most. We road 48 miles to Pleasant Valley CT. The campground manager pushed our $30 back to us and let us camp for free.

June 15th-On our Second day, we rode 87 miles through big hills. We camped in the yard of a Union, CT citizen after we stopped at the Rizza’s to find a cassette to so that we could fix Andrew’s broken spoke. The Rizzas fed us 18 eggs laid by their own chickens, let us wait out the thunderstorm in their garage, and contacted the local bike shop to get a Cassette tool. I still don’t know the name of the man who brought us the cassette tool, but he didn’t even work at the bike shop, he just wanted to help out.

We came to the end of this shortcut and the bridge was a bit gone. The ride from here to the second river crossing was pleasant since traffic was light.

June 14th-Our first night in the tent after 68 miles of sore butts. We ate Wendy’s for dinner and camped at the Minute Man Campground in Littleton, MA. It felt weird to camp so close to home in such an urban area, and we spent the night imagining ourselves later in the trip when we all would have full grown beards and giant quads.

June 13th-This was Patrick’s pregame meal the day before the trip. The King Kone girls wrote a cryptic message in ketchup and mustard.