Saturday, August 13th
Rest Day in Fallon, NV!
Today was another actual rest day! Definitely glad we pushed through 112mi the previous day to have this extra rest.
A slow morning: I woke up, wandered into one of the back rooms of the Fallon Youth Club, called my mom for a long time, and continued reading Born to Run until I fell asleep again. I crashed on one of the boomerang-shaped couches in the very cool Recreation Center. Imagine if you could sleep over in IKEA. Staying here had a similar vibe - fun furniture, giant spaces and accessible ice cream in the industrial kitchen.
I woke up for the second time around 12pm to the sounds of a friendly dog in the main room! Shannon (who coordinated our learning festival and cooked us so much wonderful food) and her amazingly loveable golden doodle Lolli had stopped by. Unfortunately, I was so enamored that I forgot to take photos, so words will have to suffice: Lolli is a large white dog with long silky ears who loves to hug people (standing on her hind legs) and carry her leash in her mouth. Playing with Lolli reminded me of my family's golden doodle Sasha who is three times smaller and three times more energetic. Looking forward to running around with her on the UMass fields when I get back to Amherst <3
Shannon told us about a local rib cook-off, so we went to check it out. We got two plates of ribs which quickly disappeared.
The ribs were delicious but we had to wait for a pretty long time in the sun and standing in flip-flops, I realized that I never think of sun-screening my feet. I also got a carrot-beet-blueberry-elderberry tea drink from one of the stands. The lady running the stand said that I looked familiar and asked if I went to the nomadic apothecary. What is a nomadic apothecary? Interesting interaction.
Still hungry, we escaped the sun-beat parking lot and headed to Lattin Farms. Fallon is known for its cantaloupe so we bought two cantaloupes, a micky lee watermelon for the watermelon fiend (me) and cookies for the cookie fiend (mariela). Also some delicious zucchini nut bread. Which I promptly ate half of.
Last but not least was a grocery run to our most frequented store - Walmart. Thus we knew for sure that we were back in civilization. Here we purchased our very last box of Clif Bars!!
Honestly the rest of the day was a blur. We played some basketball, ate some fire tacos prepared by Shannon, and slept by 10:30pm. For the last time, I prepared the titanium dioxide slides for the solar cell workshop. Getting ready for our final learning festival was a little bit sad, but also exciting because Simone and I were planning to combine the leaf chromatography and solar cell activities into one workshop.
I foolishly went back to sleep on the hard boomerang-shaped couch which probably explains a really bad upper back pain which lasted into the following day of teaching :( Apparently a firm mattress is supposed to good for your back (I have a friend who sleeps on a bed literally made of stone!), but maybe not if you're biking ~7hrs a day for several weeks.
One more day of rest. One more learning festival. Approaching one more week of Spokes. The end is becoming too real too quickly - but you know, there's still so much that can happen. So stay tuned! The best is yet to come ;)