Please excuse spelling and punctuation errors as I am trying to do this on my phone or tablet and it is turning out to be slightly challenging.
Also, there is a list of my teammates blogs on the right who are posting stories and pictures so if I don't have anything new, make sure to check out theirs.
First off, thanks so much for my family in Florida for picking me up from the airport and letting me acclimate to this crazy humidity. I really enjoyed going out to dinner with you all and playing shuffle board with everyone at the year round retirement summer camp.
The first day of orientation was a bit intimidating but quickly became lots of fun. It was a bit of a struggle to learn 31 new names and very interesting to start attaching people to their Facebook profiles that I have been following. On top of learning names, it is also helpful to know who's bike is who's...
Out of the 32 of us, only 2 people did not get bikes from Giant so there are many multiples of models and every bit of personalization helps. My bike is the problem child because it is then only one with arrow bars and there for the only one that can not be flipped over. ( see right side in above picture)
Orientation was full of presentations about the program and affordble housing and also jam packed with safety talks. Our first bike ride was the Safety Shakedown! 18 miles of sun, fun and safe riding! Oh and the first flat tire.
Build day in Jacksonville Florida
Unfortunately I do not have any photos from this day, but I spent the whole day hammering nails and rough framing a home. It was so much fun! At the end of the day, we had a hammering contest and I tied for the win with 3 hits. Then the contractor came upstairs and showed us all how it was really done with one hit.
Bike!!!!! (Finally)
Wheel dip!!!
Starting out small, this was a short 30 miler down the A1A along the coast to St. Augustine. It is the oldest city in the US settled by Spaniards. Took lots of videos with my helmet can and sometime in the near future I will figure out how to load those here.
The next two days we increased milage and rode long flat straight roads. Kinda boring for a girl from the hilly winding roads of the northwest.
And then finally Perry to Tallahassee Florida... HILLS! Short rolling hills and lots of them. And we even had a break from the never ending headwind. I was having a blast speeding up the hills and flying on the descents. I left lots of chalk encouraging my teammates to love and embrace the elevation.
Today we just finished a build day with Good News Outreach helping them retrofit their mobile home community to be termite resistent.
Check out the blogs along the right for more stories and pictures. I am going to work harder to keep taking pictures starting today.
Goals for Week 2:
Take more pictures!!!!! Minimum one every ten miles.
Blog at least twice.
