Our first week

We survived our first whole week on the road! I’m going to give a brief summary here, but let me start by saying that right now (Sunday night) we are in a motel in Herkimer, NY, sitting out the rain and wind from Hurricane (now Tropical Storm) Irene. We kept hearing about it all week, and we realized that this was going to be enough of a storm that we did not want to camp through it. We took up a friend on her gift offer of a hotel room upon our request. We had already planned a rest day for today, and it worked out perfectly for us to watch the steady rain from Irene from the dry warmth of our motel room as we did laundry and caught up on Internet work.

This week has been exhausting, but rewarding. We left John and Laura’s house on Monday morning and took off across New Hampshire. We found by day two we were starting to hit some pretty tough climbs. We didn’t even realize what was coming in Vermont. I don’t know how it didn’t register with us that Vermont (the Green Mountain State) would be so mountainous. We hit Vermont on Wednesday afternoon, and that was by far the most difficult day we have had yet. We climbed and climbed and climbed. We spent more than six hours in the saddle that day (61 miles), and the last two hours were completely uphill. We would take a break (upon Bethany’s request) every few hundred yards. We definitely made the mistake of going too hard and too far for this early in the trip. We had been trying to get to a state park in that area, and though we made it to the park (by God’s grace!), we realize that it was a terrible decision to try. Thursday included more climbing, but we scaled our mileage back by almost half. This was partly because we were so tired, and partly because it started raining steadily on us through the late afternoon.

On Friday we made it into New York and have been generally following the Erie Canal across the state, heading west toward Niagara. The flatness of this area has allowed us to get more miles in without complete exhaustion. This week we put in just over 300 miles, and we’re hoping to take it up even more in the week to come. We’ll be stopping this Friday to spend a day at Niagara Falls.

We have been blessed by the kindness of strangers as we truck along. On Tuesday, we were fortunate enough to camp in Maggie and Jack’s backyard in New Hampshire, and they shared their delicious steak dinner with us. (They also let us use their bathroom for a much-needed shower!) On Thursday, when we were getting soaked with rain in Bennington, Vermont, we stopped and asked directions from a girl named Allie. She told us we were more than welcome to camp in her yard. Her parents (Terri and Jeff) were so kind to open up their home to us… they let us do laundry, take warm showers, fed us dinner, and gave us the guest room. Most of all, they were fantastic company and we had a blast spending the evening with them.

We are going to try to post on the blog at least once a week, but it might be multiple blog posts at a time. We’re still learning to balance our schedule between riding and keeping up with our blog and getting enough sleep and everything else we have to do! Bear with us as we get a system going! And please keep us in your prayers as we continue on.

We had two flats in our first two days this week... no good!

Our first day in New Hampshire, we took a RailsTrail for about 15 miles. Though it was flat, it was slow because it was mostly gravel and sand. But it was a nice treat to be away from traffic and in the woods!

At the top of Mt. Olga in Vermont, after our hours of climbing on Wednesday--a nice view that we barely had time to enjoy before hurrying to get to the park.