Bar Harbor to Boston (or: Me and Bikey)

Well, its been an exciting past couple of weeks. To start it off, I spent a week in Bar Harbor, ME with my family. We went kayaking, bike riding, hiking, and rock climbing...all of which turned into adventures. The rock climbing was a guided climb, but we were sort of in over our heads. They took us on a 250 ft multi-pitch climb, which was lots of fun for the first 200 ft, but then my arms turned to spaghetti and I basically thought I'd be stranded on the side of a cliff forever. Ah well, I guess I need more practice (and more bicep curls). The kayaking trip on the other hand, started in beautiful, clear weather, but quickly turned to nasty stormy weather. You can kind of see the storm approaching in this picture of Aaron:



Anyhow, after the vacation in Bar Harbor, I rode my bike home to Newton, MA. That took 8 days (a total of just over 400 miles), and was relatively unexciting, but definitely challenging and good for me. I learned to trust myself a little more...like when, on the 3rd day of the trip, my chain snapped. This was a particularly rainy day, and it was a longer leg of my trip (70 miles)...so of course, 20 miles in, and in the middle of nowhere (there were some cows nearby, but that was about it) my chain went. Of course, my first instinct was to panic. But then I looked at my map and figured that I was only a mile or so outside of a tiny little town. So I walked my bike there to find that the town center consisted of a church, a post office, and a hardware store. Well, I went into the hardware store and lo and behold...they had a single bike chain, and a single bike chain tool. Almost creepy. So after a couple hours of my dad (on the phone) trying to help me figure out how to change my chain, and with the help of some friendly neighbors, we got the new chain on. Yay! And then I got a flat tire. And it never stopped raining. That was sort of the low point of the trip...but I got through it.

Otherwise the trip was pretty uneventful. I stayed in campsites every night. They ranged from "rustic" to really nice. (Rustic = pit toilets and no other amenities). I did get a little sick of showing up to a nice looking campsite, paying an outrageous $30 to stay on a tiny piece of land, and then having to pay for the crappy showers. Argh. If I owned a campsite...

I didn't take a ton of pictures (okay, I took 5 on the whole trip), but here are a couple of my favorites, both from the last day.




After the bike trip, I went into cleaning/moving mode. We moved out of our apartment, managing to keep a very minimal amount of stuff. I think I've whittled down the things I'm bringing with me to Scotland to the airline baggage allowance (yay!). We took a U-Haul of our stuff to Salvation Army...they seemed a bit overwhelmed. It feels so good to not have all that stuff now though! Now I'm crashing at the new house of my very generous friends, Josh and Lara. Just need to make sure I take care of a few little things before I leave...on Monday!

Next blog entry will be from Scotland! (Unless I get bored before then...)