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I left the Tye River Gap Campground at a little past 11 AM. It took me quite a while to get down to Vesuvius. I had only filled two water bottles, because I figured that I wouldn’t need that much water on the way down. I was wrong about that. With my braking on a 20″ wheel, my rims got HOT. I used the rear as a drag brake until it started fading and then stopped with the front. A couple times, when I stopped and squirted water on the rear, I made a decent amount of steam. It would be these downhills that eventually trashed my original tires. More about that later.
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Amy found this recipe and tried it for our United Way bake sale at work. It is the first chocolate chip cookie recipe I have ever seen with pudding in the mix.
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Unfortunately, I am easily bored. My mind wandered during a meeting at work today as we were talking about leveraging your strengths. So I started drawing on my notepad.

The gain in self-confidence of having accomplished a tiresome labor is immense. –Thomas Arnold Bennett

I woke up at 6 AM, reset my alarm, and went back to sleep. Then I woke up a 7 AMand I felt a little better about it, so I didn’t reset the alarm and I got up. I had partially packed up last night, but left the panniers empty. I maneuvered the bike out of the bike house (no an easy task, but much easier when unloaded) and started filling panniers. I then did a once through the house and straightened up anything I had disturbed in my stay. I locked up the house and dropped off a note, a donation, and the key under June’s front porch mat. I started climbing just before 8. I stopped as I passed behind Hope and Jim’s house and got a better overall pictures of the labyrinth and a few shots of the view.
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I’m a geek, no doubt about it. Only a geek would notice that today is special. The date is 2^1/2^2/2^3 or 2/4/08. At 4:32 PM or 16:32, we have a time of 2^4:2^5. Sadly there are not 64 seconds.

So enjoy a fun power of two date/time sequence that will not happen again for a hundred years.

I couldn’t pass up this fruit when I saw it at Meijer. I didn’t know anything about it, other than the fact that with a good chain, it could be a mace.

The fruit is called a Kiwano Horned Melon. I wonder how much the spines are toned down after picking. They are still seriously sharp as I picked this up.

I dropped it into a plastic bag and the spines poked through the bag until the bag hit the main body. This fruit isn’t cheap, but I’m always up for an experience.

I lopped off a little of the top, easily enough. The outer skin was fairly soft, where spikes were not present. Inside, the fruit contains green transparent sacks, each holding a seed. The fruit looks so moist that I punctured the opposite side and turned the fruit upside down to drain out some of the juice. Nothing came out. But it looked so moist.
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I woke up at around 8 AM, when June came into the bike house. She told me not to get up, but I told her to come on in. We sat and talked for an hour or so about some of the people that had come through before and about how modern times are so much different than old times. I was able to talk with June a couple of times throughout the day and had a good time during each conversation. Quite a bit of today was taking pictures of as much as I could in the bike house. There were many travel journals and books that I would like to read, but there just wouldn’t be enough time to read that much in a whole week. I started “copying” these by taking digital pictures of each page. It was a pretty quick process, but there were so many pages and articles that I wanted to read. As I am sitting here, I have taken over 1100 digital pictures from things in the house. This will take some time to sort out, but I will be glad that I get a chance to read some of them eventually.
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The rest of my pictures from the Bike House.
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The next two Trans-Am posts are almost entirely pictures. I spent two days at the bike house. I filled up my 1 Gb memory card more times than I could count. The bike house is really hard to describe. You can spend a full day trying to see everything in it and read all the notes and not get done. Luckily, some bad storms hit and I decided to stay. While it was hard to narrow all the pictures down to just two posts, I hope this gives you just a little taste of how extraordinary it is to see the “Cookie Lady” Bike House museum.
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I feel somewhat ashamed that this is the first Presidential Campaign that I have followed in detail. The reason was simply apathy. There hasn’t been a Presidential Candidate worth voting for in years. I hate that I always feel that I am picking the lesser of two evils. In the last election, I picked wrong. I believe the freedoms we lost with Bush made him worse of the two choices.
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