Day 4: Snakes and Beautiful Legs

By: Lisa Peng

Good Morning! My name is Lisa, and this is my first Spokes blog post of the trip! Today started with a 5:30am wakeup call from Pohick Bay Campground in Lorton, Virginia. After packing up our tents and eating some breakfast, we were off to biking our way to Fredericksburg, Virginia.

There were many hills and some light rain. My rain jacket hood flew out like a parachute behind me as I was going downhill, to my frustration. I also fell again going 2mph around a turn (whoops) but all is well! We stopped and ate a wonderful quinoa lunch that Bethany and Annie cooked up last night, and then parked our bikes at the University of Mary Washington so we could walk into the historic town of Fredericksburg, Virginia.

We first stopped to have some frozen custard at the famous Carl’s Frozen Custard. As we were enjoying our desserts, we made two new friends: Sarah (left center) and Virginia (right cemter). Even though they are now technology free, Sarah insisted that she would make it to a computer at work to search us up and follow us. Hi ladies!

As we were walking through the streets of Fredericksburg, we strolled by countless antique stores and music shops. We even ventured our way into the fully stocked guitar shop Picker’s Supply to pick up some picks for playing guitar on the road.

Fredericksburg was a Civil War battleground. It changed sides 17 times during the war, and saw 17,000 deaths. I felt humbled to be walking the streets of such a historical place.

After lunch, we had a little hiccup with the van car keys. The biking group accidentally rode away with the van car keys in our backpacks and left the van stranded. Annie was the hero of the day, pedaling away alone back to the van to get the keys back to Delia. What a trooper.

When we arrived to our host family’s house, we were greeted by Bruce, Vikki, Ian, Katharyn, Cory, and their dog Chewy the shih tzu.

They are about to take off on their cross-country bike trip soon as well, and were happy to chat about their route, custom jerseys, and chamois butter tips. Good luck to the White family! They made us a delicious meal of spaghetti, meat sauce, and garlic bread, told us the correct pronunciation of the town Bumpass, and even shared some of their best stretches.

A couple more bits of the good conversation from the evening (paraphrased):

Cory: the bird on the bike jersey is called Dash- on a gravestone you have your birth date and your death date with a dash in between- how you choose to spend that dash is how you choose to spend your life.

Bruce: Technically, I have beautiful legs.

Also, I held a pet California king snake and it was beautiful. I can’t wait to see what the next couple of months bring to my life.