Bike Trip - Day 3

6:20 AM on day 3 I was disturbed from sleep by something poking me in the side. I rolled over to discover Tim poking me awake. We sleepily rolled up our sleeping bags, airmats, and started packing up. We were planning to stay at our friend Nick's place in Leesburg, VA that night, so we called him to try to get in contact. Tim's phone is antique and his battery is special, so we had to use my phone. We still have a really long morning turnaround time so we were on the road around 8 or so with tummies full of leftover chinese and my brilliant invetion of granola bars smothered in peanut butter and raisins. The terrain was nicer than the past two days but was still hilly. We eventually noticed signs saying NO BIKES but we ignored them and pushed onward. The shoulder closed a while after these signs and there was construction everywhere. To make matters worse, the road was heavily trafficked and was pretty close to being a highway. We got off our bikes and tried pushing our way through the grass on the side but soon saw that the side of the road also wasn't clear. We decided to bike on the shoulder on the opposite side of the road, but that eventually closed, too. We didn't want to backtrack, so we decided to get on our bikes and book it, I mean, BOOK IT, down the road while construction workers gaped open mouthed at us. Our hearts pounded until we could get off the road and we laid on the grass to still our hearts. We were near a pizzeria, so we decided to devour a yummy sausage pizza and take a little break. An hour later we packed up and set off again. We survived being yelled at and honked at by angry truckers and country men in pickup trucks and found a nice haven in the bike trails of the Washington, DC area. These trails are awesome but unmarked and slightly confusing, so we kept asking people to help us determine which way we needed to go.

Eventually we lost the trail, but a friendly woman waiting for the schoolbus with her children showed us how to find the trail again. We called Nick and had a very confusing time figuring out where to meet him. DC has awful traffic, so it was going to be hard for him to pick us up. We eventually figured things out and found the trail again and found the place where he planned to pick us up. We had biked about 52 miles for the day for about 142 miles total over the three days of biking. We wanted to learn more about the bike trails, so we asked an older couple who were walking on the trails with a child. They were visiting from Germany and didn't know the area well, but they said that their daughter in law was a local, and that she would come around soon. While we waited, Tim conversed with the couple in German and discovered that we will be visiting Germany close to their hometown this summer. Their daughter in law eventually wandered along the trail with another child. She said she wasn't completely sure about the bike trails, but invited us to her nearby house to look up the trails on her computer. We went along with them, figured everything out, had a nice chat, and eventually wandered back to our meeting place in wait for Nick. He was stuck in bumper to bumper traffic, so we read books and Tim fixed his ever finicky bike. Eventually Nick arrived, and we all drove to his aunt's house. We didn't get stuck in any traffic and arrived around 8:30 PM. We met his aunt and youngest two cousins, Tess and Taylor. They had just gotten home from gymnastics. Tess is really cute and spunky and can talk your ear off if you let her. She showed us their turtles when we were doing our laundry, and showed Tim up at the piano. We had nice, relieving, warm showers after a somewhat depressing and rainy day, and then we met Nick's older cousin Tanner. He was a little spacey and out of it because he had just hit his head in a baseball game and most likely had a concussion. Eventually, Nick, Tim and I went out to eat at the Mighty Midget which had german style sandwiches that Tim really liked and yummy french fries as well. Eventually we returned to Nick's aunt'shouse and since we were all exhausted, we headed right to sleep.

Time with Tim:
RAINING, WHY IS IT RAINING?! Morning was wet. Afternoon was OK, and we got to a DC bike trail that was very poorly labeled. Other things are poorly labeled, like vanilla extract that tastes nothing like vanilla, but this was worse because we got mad lost multiple times. The friendly DC residents (after an initial fear of weird psychos on bikes) guided us to our trail, often in broken english. Then we found Germans! I talked to them in German, and they liked my German! Wunderbar?