Day 50: the early bird

Hey y’all - it’s Dustin again - today was pretty short and sweet so the blog will obviously be at least 5 pages (jk it’ll probably be short because we are tired and just want to be home). Today we woke up earlier than we have in weeks at 6am and had a stellar breakfast of eggs, bacon, sausage, and oj thanks to Heather - and then promptly got on the road at 7am. Coincidently leo and Pat are also no longer here.. sooooooo I’m not going to say they were stopping us from starting earlier.. but you know.. 🤷🏼‍♂️ and if Pat or Leo are reading this - you know it’s true.

Anyway - Tom decided he would ride with us for about 30 miles and FINALLY I had someone there to tow me along since for the past few weeks I’ve been almost exclusively doing the towing - honestly I don’t really mind that much because I like being in front - but it’s fun to give Julia and Brian a hard time about it - so I’ll continue to complain until the joke isn’t funny anymore. Just like how I complain about Julia being the last to be ready every morning even though that’s not true at all - but she gets mad every time - I have to entertain myself somehow. Anyway - it was nice of Tom to give me a tow this morning so the first 30 miles were probably the easiest of the whole trip and since it was early it wasn’t impressively hot. Here’s I nice picture I took while riding with Tom this morning:

After the 30 miles we parted ways with Tom and started on again - we were doing pretty well - we got 60 miles done before noon so we could really take our time for the rest of the day. Brian has disclosed to us that he’s never had a McDonald’s cheeseburger the other day. And when you combine that with the fact that he thinks the Canada side of Niagara Falls is superior and that he is way too nice - it kinda seems to me like he must be one of them socialists that those Canadians keep breeding - I mean how unamerican can you be? Anyway - the point is that he’s never had a McDonald’s cheeseburger and Julia and can’t believe that even more than we couldn’t believe that Julia had never heard of Tim Hortons (perhaps the most American thing you can say) so we chose to go to McDonald’s for lunch. 

After ordering and sitting down we asked Brian if he got a cheeseburger and he said no - and you can imagine Julia and I’s shock and disappointment - like why else would we stop at McDonalds? We haven’t had fast food all trip? Why start now other than to get Brian to share in a pillar of Americana? We’ve been pushing him to expand his horizons - and this time he said he doesn’t want to expand his horizons for a McDonald’s cheeseburger - but that’s what he says every time we don’t successfully bully him into trying something new… anyway - here I am sitting right next to him awkwardly eating my McDonald’s cheeseburger thinking it really isn’t that bad - I guess my pallet is quite unrefined - cue me waiting for Gordon Ramsay to show up and yell at me like a New Yorker yells at any cyclist. 

Anyway - after lunch we carried on and the gps again brought us to a closed trail - and this time we didn’t end up in a very nice mans yard so we had to go back the way we came - breaking my only rule of the trip ‘never go back’… but it wasn’t that far so we were too mad, but we kept biking and the day was pretty nice so we went kinda slow and just talked awhile until we got to our destination at about 4pm. Amazing how when you get up early you can actually do 93 miles and still finish with time left in the day, I wish we did this the whole trip.. I guess the early bird really does get the worm - or at least it gets a beer earlier than it would have otherwise 🤷🏼‍♂️

So we settled in with some of Julia’s childhood friends’ grandparents’ house and a good bit of the family came over and we all had a nice dinner - Bob - the grandfather - is also an MD so we got to talk to him a lot about school and how’s it’s changed over the years which was pretty cool. After dinner we got ready for bed pretty early because we are trying to leave tomorrow by 6 to get a jump on what is supposed to be the hottest day yet - so catch us tomorrow to see how we fare in the heat - I want to do 100 miles and make it basically home - but Julia and Brian don’t want to - we’ll see who wins this battle tomorrow 😋

P.S. i of course has to watch F1 qualifying for the French Grand Prix after our ride and I’m happy to say that my boy lewis will be starting 4th in the race tomorrow - go merc! (I know none of you actually care but hey, like I said before, haters can keep hating) goodnight everyone! See ya in CT tomorrow!