The Final Four!!!

The NBA has nothing on us...we have our own Final Four - our final four days of biking!! The NBA eliminates and we are including everyone....one big team and we will all make it to the finish line. As of this morning we still had two girls feeling under the weather...one getting over a bug that had lasted about 4 days and one who was dehydrated and needed to make a trip to ER for an IV. Yes, we are on the home stretch...the end is in sight. As I biked today I kept thinking of the journey and Kirby and I both felt like we hadn't biked across the U.S.; but like we had been on a daily bike ride for two months. We feel like we have biked 2900 miles 10 miles at a time. We always do everything in 10 mile increments, get off our bikes to stretch and drink, ride 10 more and do the same. Some how riding 10 miles 7 times in one day is easier than thinking of riding 70 miles. Oh, the games we play!

The scenery since leaving the gulf coast hasn't changed much, still completely wooded, some swamps and rivers, birds chirping and beautiful roads. All flat today. So I'm short on scenery pictures and long on people. Above is cook Linda. This picture is out of order, but she is doing her famous "sniff test". About 6-10 of us do dishes each night and she puts everything away checking very, very carefully to make sure EVERYTHING is clean or it gets sent back. The pans, etc. she "sniffs" to make certain they don't smell like whatever she cooked that night. Pans are often rejected by her. We have a method to trick her.....we let the pans soak in bleach water for a bit longer than necessary so the food smell is gone. Hopefully, she isn't reading this blog!

KP duty, I'm usually the one of two dishwashers...but I sometimes get relieved when the pans are ready to be done. It really is a fun time of evening and we always play music and dance a bit if we have enough energy.

White Zin is playfully called "low class red neck pink shit" by the ladies who drink wine on this trip. Not being much of a wine drinker, I'm not sure how it got that name - but every night they ask "who wans some low class, red neck pink shit?"

After 50 some days of doing this blog I still can't figure out how to re-arrange the pictures into the order I want them....so here is some scenery....I believe this duck is called the common morhead...has a beautiful red head. Today we passed a few black snakes, and a couple of turtles on the side of the road. About 10 feet off to the side, near a creek, was an 8 foot gator laying in the mud. He heard us and went into the water.

I wanted to show you the fun we have after dishes at our "dance party", but the videos I took of others dancing were too long and I always got an "error message" when loading on blog. So this is one Kirby took...sorry it's all about me, but it is the only one that will load!

p.s. The blog for Saturday and Sunday was just posted today so you may want to go back a day to see that too.