carson city → fallon
when i visited her house last year, my friend michelle described a phenomenon called “ambient awareness” — she defined it as one’s ability to know how their partner/friend was feeling, without having to talk to them about it. it’s the feeling of walking into your apartment and knowing that your roommate had a bad day, for example.
a curious deer observes our movements, through the window of our host’s home
i think we’ve developed pretty strong ambient awareness on the spokes team—from my perspective, we’re all pretty good at knowing when to give each other space and we’re developing unspoken ways of communicating.
our hosts from last night seemed to think so too—during dinner, i commented how joel had woken up twice, not once like he thought, to use the bathroom and one host commented that we already sound like a married couple.
after dinner, katherine spearheaded a much-needed effort to reorganize our sag wagon. over the course of the next six hours, the team (well, mostly joel, katherine, sophia, and aja) took everything out of the van, sorted it into different boxes, and packed it back into the van. during that time, i was setting up for the spokes movie night: we were watching everything, everywhere, all at once. we hung up a linen sheet on the side of our host’s garage and set up our projector to watch the movie. unfortunately, the reorganization didn’t finish until 11pm, and there wasn’t enough time to watch the movie afterwards.
high off the energy from reorganizing the car, we were all insistent that, in the morning, we would be more efficient getting out the door. generally, we take ~3 hours from waking up to rolling out, but tomorrow morning, we were determined to wake up at 6 and start our route at 7:30.
this morning, at 6 sharp, I woke up to a skin-crawling symphony of six different alarm noises. i feel like you can tell a lot from the alarm choice that a person makes: joel, aja, and i are simple—we use the standard alarm. katherine and timothy prefer more elaborate noises as though they need to be eased into the soul-crushing experience of getting out of bed.
it seems that our determination held strong this morning (even though we’d barely gotten six hours of sleep): we’d finished most of our preparation by 7:30 and we started biking around 8am, two hours after we’d woken up. many of the spokes are still pushing for us to wake up earlier, develop a more streamlined process for moving our belongings to the sag wagon, and create a more systematic organization of the car. i’m more nonchalant about those things—and tremendously impressed by our improvement since the beginning of the trip. in a few weeks, we’ll likely be a well-oiled machine.
we set off for our first full day of biking through nevada, mostly on highway 50. i found the experience to be mostly flat and quite pleasant. the terrain was substantially different from california; lots of pastel colors and rolling hills in the distance. we were biking really close to cars which was very stressful—what’s more, apparently Nevada drivers have a habit of honking twice at bikers as a way of saluting them? i didn’t like it.
katherine boiled eggs for us last night and at the second rest stop, sophia decided to… eat? obliterate? one:
sophia holding the remnants of her egg — sorry, her “arch-nemesis"
my favorite part of today was an un-planned stop. there wasn’t a restroom at the rest point, so after we’d pulverized the remaining eggs, we went to a nearby subway. not only did the employees let us use their restroom, they offered us cold water from their fridge and we got to chat with them about their lives—we heard about how they met each other and started dating, how they hate high school, and how excited they were to meet folks “on an adventure.” to the subway staff in silver springs: i doubt you’ll read this, but if you do, thank you for your kindness 💜
two hours and six sore butts later, we arrived at our stop for the night: a church in fallon which generously allowed us to sleep in their auditorium and use their kitchen, showers, and laundry machines.
it’s a lovely space, and i’m excited to spread out on the floor after last night’s experience of packing ourselves, like sardines, into such a small house.
biking so continuously has given me some weird cravings; today it was ice cream. we all went to a locally-famous ice cream shop called skeeters and devoured the delicious food outside. some of us snuck to the nearby kfc to get fried chicken (another bike craving) which the flexitarians and meat-eaters on our team enjoyed.
the day wrapped up with another delicious dinner made by katherine, aja (who made a sauce!! even though they hate sauces!!), timothy, and sophia (even though she doesn’t want credit 👀). we had falafel, salad, rice, potato crisps, and candied pecans—all of which nearly blew away in the wind after katherine moved us outdoors.
65.26mi, 4:10:31 moving time
—parth