Just got word from the “Biker Boys,” as they have become known in the emails flying around among parents and a few farflung relatives hosting them. They’ve developed a sort of virtual pit crew out here in cyberspace, supplementing the ground crew of various lovely people hosting them on couches, extra beds and the occasional floor. Thank you to all hosts!!! Parents on home base send things to places we know the boys will land – in one case, a dorm room at Harvard – so they’ll have warm clothes, plenty of energy bars, and the sense that we will always be here for them.
So far, the trip has taken them, on the bikes, from Elm Avenue in Takoma Park, up to Baltimore, through Philly (and a few nights with friends at Temple University), to New York City, where they stayed in Aunt Rebecca and Uncle Craig’s ballet studio (bikes at the barre. see photo for a scene on Broadway!). Then it was on to two different Ivy Leagues – Yale, and Harvard – where they stayed with college student friends and sampled the collegiate night life. After that, a three-day train ride took them from Boston to Seattle, and a bus trip for Eliot and Tyler went to Anacortes, about 70 miles north, where they got to eat grilled salmon with Aunt Sarah and cousin Conor (sorry they missed you, Richard!); Tom got to have a visit with friend Ana at Lewis and Clark College, in Portland. Then T & E bussed to Portland to join Tom again and they all mounted their bikes and pedaled south.
Current location: just south of Florence, Oregon, on the Coastal Highway, Highway 101, which is apparently a bike route as well as a roadway, Tyler says with plenty of shoulder – and I know this is important as those cars shoosh by at 50 mph. It is beautiful, all along the Oregon coastline, with cliffs dropping down to ocean. They recently rode through the Siuslaw National Forest. There are plenty of campgrounds for $4 a night per hiker or biker, and sometimes free (I didn’t ask).
People on the road have been incredibly generous – at one point, somewhere on the east coast (was that between NYC and Boston, or Philly and NYC?) the boys were asking strangers if they could camp on their lawns. The result: not only accommodations on a lawn, but one night in someone’s home (the college-age son was away so there was an available bedroom), and feast-like meals that included homegrown corn and big salad and burgers, and biker-sized breakfasts and even snacks for the road. This sort of generosity restores my faith in America, and inspires me to similar acts of kindness should I ever be asked to host a transient posse of pedalers passing through my own town. I think people are so excited about their trip that they’re happy to pitch in to help make it happen.
The boys are by all accounts hungry all the time. No kidding. They’re biking, at this point, 50 to 70 miles a day. They’ve discovered Dollar Tree, Tyler says, “where everything is actually a dollar.” Today the guys got a skillet to add to the pot they hunted down in NYC, so they have two cooking vessels. Tonight’s dinner: steak from the campstove. Yep. My vegetarian boy has put aside his veggie ways for practical reasons. Fuel.
Thank goodness for cell phones – even though Tyler eschewed bringing his own, he’s borrowed his friends’ to reach us a few times. It’s always great to hear his voice. And I’m grateful that Eliot’s little trick of burying his rained-on phone in a bag of rice seems to have dried it out sufficiently to work again. Gotta love these creative solutions. I’m sure they’re learning loads.
I've heard the rice-cell phone trick is a mixed bag. But my sister dropped her phone to the bottom of a pool and it worked for her. (Which is working for me, now that she passed it along to me when she got a new one.)
ReplyDeleteTurns out it didn't work entirely -- he had to replace the phone in the end
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