Day 12

It's been an incredible and eventful past couple of days. A good friend from Wheaton of mine once said "you don't walk into heaven, you're carried in on a stretcher". That sort of sums up how yesterday's riding felt. We started outside the town of Catskill, NY and continued on little mountain roads through small towns that wound their ways through the foothills of gigantic mountain ranges. There were many, many hills to climb, which is good at this point in the trip because we're the strongest and best in shape we've been thus far, but it was still pretty tough. With a steady headwind and well over 100 miles to cover for the day, we rode long and hard for over seven hours to finally reach the town of Sparta, where my housemate from last year at Wheaton-Christian-lives. My phone with the GPS directions died as we rolled into town, so we called Christian from Reece's phone and he offered to come the four miles to pick us up because we were both pretty dead. Lucky we are that he did...little did we know all the rolling hills we had climbed would completely pale in comparison to this last four miles to his house, which was all uphill and would've been extremely difficult to manage traversing. Here's a picture of the elevation to give an idea, and keep in mind everything before the very end of the map was already really hard riding even though it looks almost negligible:

So we were very blessed to get a ride back with him and his dad the last four miles to his house. They have a beautiful home in one of the highest points around New Jersey, and we ate like kings as they made an awesome steak dinner for us. So that was last night. We're resting up today and then at some point riding 15-20 more miles to our other friend Caleb's house that we were originally going to stay with in NJ, but wasn't ready to have us until Saturday night. 

Here are some pictures from the last couple days-the riding yesterday through New York and New Jersey was some of the most beautiful landscape and countryside I've ever seen:

So yeah, that's been the last couple of days. Riding out of Buffalo, I met a Vietnam vet that was drafted in '69 who fixed my broken spoke. We've met so many interesting people like that, it's really fascinating. I think on these kind of journeys that's a large part of the experience, and it's certainly been that for us.