(I don’t have Wi-Fi right now, so I’m uploading this blog using my hotspot’s limited bandwidth. Tomorrow when I have Wi-Fi I’ll retroactively add some photos to this blog post.)
Today we passed through a town called Centerburg, so named because it’s the geographic center of Ohio. We stopped at a coffee shop there called Centerbean.
With fewer than two weeks remaining in the trip, the Spokes are a well-oiled machine. At the very least, a functional, moderately-oiled one. Our mornings used to be hectic, slow, and disorganized; in the first week of the trip, there were some mornings when we took four hours to get out the door. Ody’s trunk used to be a mess of empty cardboard boxes, with important items scattered across unlabeled bins and personal bags. But as the weeks stacked up, we streamlined our car packing system and developed an effective morning routine. Now when we wake up we spring into action immediately. Each person has fallen into an unofficial role. Today we came up with titles for each of these roles, which I’ve decided to share here:
Sophia: Freezer Caesar (Sophia usually unpacks the contents of our cooler into our hosts’ fridges and re-packs the cooler in the morning. Also, Sophia is a classics major.)
Joel: Gallon Golem (We carry seven plastic one-gallon jugs of water in the car. Joel fills them in the morning and packs them into the car.)
Parth: Tire Squire (Parth checks and inflates all of the bike tires in the morning.)
Katherine: SAG Hag (Cyclists call cars that carry gear SAGwagons. SAG is an acronym for Support And Gear. We don’t think that Katherine is a hag, but it was hard to come up with a funny rhyme / alliteration.)
Timothy: Car Czar (I pack the car in the morning. The Czar title may refer to some authoritarian tendencies. I tend to be *slightly* militant about packing the car and insist that all bags are packed and left next to the car before breakfast begins.)
Aja: Budget Baron (Aja manages the Spokes budget, keeping careful track of our funds and submitting reimbursements whenever one of us pays for gas / groceries / etc.)
We came up with the nicknames tonight over dinner with our Mt. Vernon hosts, Bill and Marsha. They’re cool people. Marsha runs an art gallery in the town, Bill is a photographer, and their son is a painter, so the house is full of paintings on huge canvasses, framed photographs, and sculptures by local artists. We’ve spent a good deal of time here strolling around and appreciating all the art. And Marsha is a vegetarian! For the first time in a while, Sophia, Aja, and I got to eat a dinner replete with protein, a lovely quinoa and bean dish. At dinner, we chatted with them about their travels, including a funny Amsterdam story.
After dinner, I convinced a critical mass of Spokes to play Codenames (a word-guessing table game). Marsha joined in for the first round, too. My team – Aja, Katherine, and I – ended up on a winning streak. Below you can see some pictures of Sophia becoming increasingly demoralized as Parth and Joel fail to correctly guess her clues. [said photos will appear here when i upload them tomorrow] ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It’s weird that we’re in the final stretch of this trip. Sometimes it feels like we just started. Other times it feels like we’ve been doing this forever and that we’ll continue forever.
Anyway, I received some questions from blog readers, which I’m answering below.
If Timothy had to move to one city you've been in on this trip, what city would he pick?
I liked Kansas City! But that may have been because it had the highest concentration of roller skating rinks… Not to mention the free buses and the smattering of cool used book stores and record shops.
Timothy’s questions to Timothy (from Day 12): What have you been listening to on your ride? What have you been thinking about on the road?
Hmmmm. I’ve been listening to a rotation of audiobooks. The one I’ve spent the most time with recently is Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem. I’ve also been taking out my headphone (singular, since I only keep it in my right ear) and listening to the wind more, which is a nice change of pace.
I think about a lot of things, but rarely while biking do I have the bandwidth to think deeply about any one thing. Usually my thoughts jump from one thing to another every couple minutes. Sometimes I replay scenes of my favorite movies and anime series in my head. Sometimes I just stress about the emails I’ve been forgetting to send. And ever since the new course catalog was released I’ve been thinking about the courses I want to take.
Timothy: When is a frozen custard overloaded with Oreos, and not just loaded :) ?
Someone’s asking the important questions. The metaphysical distinction between “overloaded” and “loaded” is tenuous, to say the least. There’s no hard metric, no weight percentage of Oreo at which point loaded Oreo custard becomes overloaded. But, as an intuitive rule-of-thumb, I’d say that to be “overloaded,” the custard should have at least one Oreo chunk per bite.
Till next time,
-Timothy