Sleeping Beauty And The Seven Dwarves

When we painted the trailer in St. Augustine, our team decided to write the words "sleep, eat, bike, build".  Little did we know that those four words would be such a fully-encompassing summary of our time with Bike & Build. 

Sure, you guys have all realized that we are doing a considerable amount of biking and building this summer, but to underline our love of food and our love of naps, let me provide these snapshots of yesterday's lunch break.  

Sleeping. (I'm the horizontal one in the middle). 

Eating.  

Sleeping and eating. 

There have also been some questions about our lovely and generous hosts.  This past night, we stayed at East Baptist Church of De Funiak Springs.  When we arrived, several members of the church family were there to greet us with snacks and directions around the church.  

Our first move is always to establish a place for our bicycles.  After the bikes are situated in a room, a lot of us scout out the different sleeping locations.  Anything softer than a tile floor is prime realestate and couches are absolute gems.  Most days, riders are able to relax and shower between when they arrive at the host site and 6pm, the normal dinner time.  After dinner, we sometimes give presentations to the host sites that would like one and sometimes we have other responsibilities.  

Today was a special day because it was our third riding day.  Every third riding day, Bike & Builders do...LAUNDRY!!!  We lay out a 20X20 tarp and after everyone's stuff is thrown in, we burrito the tarp and take it to the nearest laundry mat.  We dominate about half the laundry mat's machines and when everything is dried, we reburrito it in the tarp and take it back to the host site for all our teammates to sort through.  

After returning from laundry around 9pm, we begin to wind down and get ready for bed.  Ideally, bags are 95% packed the night before.  On ride days, curfew is 11pm and most riders begin crashing before that deadline because we are generally awake by 5am the next morning.  On build days, curfew is 1am with a 7am wake up.  

In the morning, people roll out of their sleeping bags blurry eyed and hoping for 5 more minutes of rest.  We pack up, change, eat breakfast, pack trailers, fill coolers, do maintenance on our bikes and have a group route meeting that outlines the day's plans and details.  After route meeting, riders are free to hit the road.  

So that is an abbreviated day in the life.  Sleeping.  Eating.  Biking.  And building.