May 26, 2019
Hello everyone, I’m Erin Leydon, and I’m a freshman at MIT majoring in aerospace engineering. I’m from just outside Atlanta, GA, and if you’d like to know more, please check out the ‘Team’ page!
After almost two semesters of planning and training, we are finally on our way! This morning, we all gathered outside of MacGregor (one of the MIT dorms) to load all of our stuff into the vans. As it turns out, between the eight of us, we have a lot of stuff, which makes packing very interesting. We did, however, get everything in the van and six out of the eight of us started driving (Evan will meet up with us after graduation, and we were on our way to pick up Leah in Pennsylvania).
At this point, we hadn’t run into any problems, so we were bound to hit a bump in the road. As we were stopping at a rest stop for food about a half hour outside of Boston, I realized I had left my jacket with my wallet and phone on the ground back at MIT, so we took one of the vans and drove back to pick it up. Although this cost us some time, we figured it out and got on the road before too long.
From there, we drove to Pennsylvania, where we stopped at Leah’s house to pick her up. Her family was so nice and inviting, and we really appreciated the delicious soup, salad, and brownies that they had made for us. We also picked up a whole stack of books, which will come in handy when we get free time after cycling all day.
Unfortunately, we still had a long way to drive, so we couldn’t stay for long. The rest of the drive was pretty uneventful, except for some questionable music choices and a bit of traffic, and before long, we arrived at my Aunt Laura and Aunt Amy’s house! Although it is just the Spokes team at her house now, my parents and my aunts will be here soon to send us on our way. We really appreciate my aunts letting us stay here, and these just might be some of the nicest accommodations we will have this summer, as we will be staying in tents most nights, and won’t have access to air mattresses and real beds for a while.
Before bed, some of us used my aunt’s hot tub for some much needed relaxation after the long drive, and we all went to bed.
Tomorrow we should be well rested and ready to gather everything we need for our trip. And the day after that, we start biking. I think we’ve all been anticipating the start of this trip for a long time, so it feels very exciting to think that we will actually be starting our trip so soon. We are so excited to meet everyone between here and San Francisco, and we hope that y’all will enjoy following along with our blogs!
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