In Georgia

Every morning we wake up at 5:30 am to music for a dance party. This is nothing new to me since that's when and how I get to crew practice. But on the day we set out for Georgia, we listened to Ray Charles.

First state line crossing!

 In Georgia, we decided we really needed to get this van painted. It's still a work in progress, but here's most of it:

The back is in memory of an SC2SC rider on the 2011 trip, Christina Genco, who was killed en route in a collision. All the 2012 jerseys have her initials on them - I own two of these jerseys.

Our stats are growing! For the logo design on the left, I included 9 different rider hands.

 Yesterday's ride from Taylors, SC to Hartwell, GA, Chris and I wanted to crush it so that we'd be sore today. You see, Chris and I were today's assigned sweeps. The sweeps are the two people at the back of all the riders, and are responsible for making sure no one's left behind. We carry spare tires, address issues along the road, and go pretty slow. So Chris and I knew that we could go hard yesterday because we had to take it easy on today's 46 mile route to Athens, GA.

We were really inspired by the Scraper Bike song that's pretty popular on Youtube:

So we decided to make our own scraper bikes. We took aluminum foil and wrapped pieces around the spokes of our front tires, which makes them look like hubcaps, obviously. "Scraper bikes roll hard / I don't need no car." But I don't think anyone else on the team knew what a scraper bike was, so us G's had to educate them.

 Luckily, nothing serious happened while being scrapes (what we used to call being sweeps). But the aluminum foil was killing our speed (which is really just resistance training, right?) so we eventually ditched the tin foil. At lunch we met the co-founder of Habitat for Humanity. Being scrape means you can take lots of pit stops, like visiting this goat field behind a gas station.

Though I have no pictures to prove it, the host tonight in Athens was just phenomenal. There was a table filled with food that went on forever. I sat with a 73 year old man named Wes who was really neat to talk to. The church then brought in a bluegrass band for us. The band performed in the sanctuary, and the whole team quickly began square dancing in the aisles of the church. We demanded a two-song encore because they were so great.