Charlottesville, VA

Charlottesville, VA

8.12.2010

Today was a beautiful ride. The plan was to go about 80 miles on the day, even though the town was only 50 miles away when using the interstate. I didn’t mind that we were taking back roads the whole day, because the scenery was gorgeous, and after all we don’t have too much more time on the bike. We were very lucky too, because Bruce Rogers was doing a ride along with our route today. Bruce Rogers is the man who served as the inspiration for the Journey of Hope. He was the first Pi Kapp to ride his bike across the country to raise money for Push America and today is one of the trip’s biggest sponsors. The legend himself was riding in our pace line, and we got to find out all about how he did the trip when he rode. It’s incredible how he made it the whole way without a crew supporting him.


Unfortunately for him and for the rest of us, we had a record distance wrong turn today. We went an absurd 20 miles in the wrong direction. There was one crew stop where we made a left turn instead of a right turn and just kept going for another hour or so. We were getting suspicious when we saw our shadows in front of us at 9:00am, but we figured we were just headed a little west to get through a mountain pass or something. Soon we saw the Blue Ridge mountains looming in front of us, and we were sure something was wrong. We discovered that after riding for 45 miles, we had gone a total of 10 miles outside of Lynchburg. It was really frustrating, especially for Bruce who flew out from Colorado to meet up with us. Eventually we got back on track though and hammered out the last 20 miles to lodging. It was a frustrating day, but the chipotle we got at the end of the ride made up for it a little.


The friendship visit that night made me forget about the day’s frustrations. It was at the Charlottesville Arc center, where we had a huge spaghetti dinner followed by dancing. I met a 14 year old girl named Victoria who was hearing impaired, and I was able to communicate her a little bit using the sign language I’ve managed to scrape together over the summer. I think she got bored with my three year old level of English after a while, but it still felt good for me to be able to try signing a little bit.

It’s our last day of riding tomorrow. It feels so weird that this is coming to an end.