Well, it's been quite some time since my one and only blog entry and a lot has happened. For one, we're no longer in New Hampshire, finally! And we've actually passed through Vermont and are well into New York. We spent two days building two houses in the area. I worked at the house in Lebanon, hitting out cement ties and putting insulation on the basement for two mornings. The second afternoon we all got to join the group working on a roof in Norwich, VT. A very steep roof, and one of my jobs involved leaning forward to pull things onto the steep roof... that was fun. They also let me use a nail gun, not sure they thought that one through! All in all it was a very productive two days and we made real progress on the houses.
The day we left Lebanon was rumored to be "the hardest day of the trip" Good thing we had two days of rest (for our legs) under our belts. The morning was nice with rolling hills. I remember there was rain. But there's been a lot of rain. The end of the 60 miles involved a mountain. Mount Bethel. 6 miles of steep grades and sharp curves, and not the fun downhill ones, but the uphill ones. Also fun, but with a little more pain. It was a long slow climb. Some people saw some record lows on their odometers, one girl reported seeing 2mph for at least part of her ride. But after the uphill, there were 4 miles of really fun downhills! Although, the road was wet, so that made them fun. When we made it to the bottom of the Mountain, we learned that the church, was not where we thought it was... so there was some riding up and down of hills until we found a nice driver to tell us where it was. We stayed the night in Rochester, VT. A small, quaint New England town nestled in the mountains. And in a situation very similiar to Avon, small year round population, but lots of second homes. They also had a bike shop and an AMAZING cafe with some quality baked goods. The guys at the bike shop warned us we had a "gnarly ride" coming the next day.
And now it's time to go to dinner... so I've caught you up to last week, I'll try to write more later!