...or so it seemed

At the base of the parade, less than an 1/8 of a mile into our true route (literally in those last two hours we'd made it all the way nowhere... and yet I wouldn't have had it any other way... because look at the pages of information and feeling we would have missed out on!), we found ourselves at the base of the 7th or 8th steepest & longest... most intense... hill of the entire trip (I was going to say it was the second... but then I remember we biked through the entire state of Connecticut. Damn she's as beautiful as she is painful).

"So we're really doin' this huh?" Adam shouted again with a smirk on his face. It was then that we discovered our new tag-line for the next two months; almost as if to say: "this is crazy shit, but so are we... and since we have no better common sense let's get to it".

I committed to the hill *ahem* I committed to the first 2/3 of the hill. This biatch came out of nowhere! What are you thinking Maine?! The lactic acid built up in my thighs so tight I couldn't figure another way to make it to the peak than to pull to the right and take a breather. That's when a car full of mangey teenagers drove toward us and passed us from the oncoming traffic lane shouting, "get on the sidewalk idiots!".

Didn't they know?! We are on road bikes, excuse me, we don't take these on the sidewalk... hence ROADbike. Mind you, I would have loved to be on the sidewalk. I would have felt MUCH more comfortable with the curb protecting me... we were traveling quite slowly. But as I believe I've already mentioned, I, and by "I" I mean "we" all had some naive version of protection clouding our minds that made us able to ride inches close to cars... and semis... and turtles. (I'll save the turtle story for later)

For every uphill there's a downhill... well except this one (and 6 others in Connecticut). This hill, however, leveled off. and we continued.

mile.
after mile.
inch.
after inch.

Adam and I pulled over for a break at the top of a hill to rest. We had no food, so we just chatted. All I remember is that I needed the restroom... but there was nothing, just a parking lot and some public forest building that was closed on a Sunday. We just chilled for a moment and it was back on the saddle.

I had fun chasing the hills, believe me there were plenty of them. I also enjoyed watching Adam shake ruthlessly each time he coasted past me due to the extra 100 lbs he was trailing. Each downhill Brah Perrier shook like a leaf. Each time we hit the downhill I expected him to barrel-roll 100 times over (if you would have seen him you would have thought the same), and if this were to happen he'd take me out with him like Bowzer and Princess Peach in Mario Kart, but we were relentless. Relentless and dumb. Exactly what we needed to be.

That whole afternoon I thought about the conversation Adam and I had had the night before we embarked on this trip. I remember sitting in Adam's garage in Marshfield, WI; looking at him straight in the eyes, "There's nothing that's going to stop me on this trip", Adam agreedm "Oh absolutely, nothing". I'd already accepted what obvious toils we may encounter: I imagined we'd get sick, I imagined we'd fall, I imagined someone would end up in the hospital, and everyone told us we were going to get hit by cars, kids up to no good would come searching for our camp at night to ransack us, I figured we'd knock on a few creeps doors, and we also found out we were trailing the wake of a hurricane (I don't know how we missed that bit of news, must have been delivery week or something). These things we accepted... must have been that cloud of naivety.

But hills? Duh. No brainer... we KNEW there'd be hills. Keep on and carry on my friend. One more hill. One more mile. That motto got us 39 miles that first day. By the end of our trip that was peanuts, but to someone that'd never exceeded 21 miles... those were 18 very literal milestones.