Coast to Coast for a Cause 2022

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...

Hey it’s Julia! What a lovely day it was today. We woke up in beds (which is always a good start to the day, compared to when we have to sleep on the ground) and we had a great breakfast with Tracy and her husband. Dustin was able to bond with them through Wordle, Formula 1, and New Hamphire because he finally found someone else who loves that state as much as he does.  We shipped off for our nice short 38mile day. Honestly, this was a much needed day. We have been doing some crazy long days and I think we were really starting to feel the tiredness kicking in. Also, we are truly riding straight into this heatwave and we did not want to be in the blistering afternoon heat for a 3rd day in a row. So today we carried the moto of “Easy, Breezy, Beautiful. Biker Girl.”  Today was pretty uneventful. We accidentally went down some grass trail that Google Maps said would have a bridge (it did not) and ended up in someone’s backyard. The owner was outside and came over to us and was li...

Today marks two very important occasions. Today marks only five days until we finish the trip and is the day we finally separated from the Philly boys. We’ve had five or six times where we thought we would be separating from Pat and Leo throughout the past month of biking with them but today was the real one. We started the day traveling together for about 20 miles on the same Canal trail that we were on yesterday before getting to a crossroads where Leo and Pat were going north and we were going east. Tears were shed, snacks were eaten and Pat promised to send Dustin an ‘I love you’ message every night.  Once the boys were gone it was quiet. No movie quotes, random yelling, or old jokes. We had a 96 mile day ahead of us and we were trying to mentally prepare ourselves for another 76 miles. Our preparation wasn’t enough. Today was another hard day. We have been pretty lucky with heat so far on the trip but we are actively biking into the heat wave and it has been ROUGH. We had a li...

As my eyes opened all there was was pain.. I felt so good yesterday after riding 130 miles - I felt like I leveled up in life - but this morning - my body reminded me that I didn’t quite have enough XP - my glass knees are once again screaming - and my legs muscles feel like they are going to tear in half with every step no matter how much I stretch..  Oh and just so everyone knows - despite the title of the blog - no one got hit by a car today Anyway, we had a pretty late start today after going to bed really late last night. We got going around 9 and got some breakfast a dennys which was ‘okay’ but it did the trick and filled us up. After that we got our bikes and started to set out. We had planned the night before to take a picture with all 5 of us at the falls in the morning because it’ll be our last day together, but it was so late by the time we left we decided to forgo that since we had 93 miles to ride.  Things have a way of working itself out though because we got stu...

Hey hey it’s Julia! So this morning I had the pleasure of waking up to Dustin calling over to me, “hey hey Julia…. Do you wanna talk about Marco Rubio and student loans?” When I responded with a groan and rolling over in my sleeping bag because I was still half asleep and my alarm had only just gone off, Dustin was not pleased. “Julia it is always a good time to talk about student loans.” I would beg to differ.  Once we finally got up, we had an absolutely incredible breakfast with our WarmShower hosts. Makiko is a great baker! She made these cheese stuffed breads and another kind of stuffed bread. We haven’t had this great of a breakfast in a long time. Much better than Clif Bars and gas station food.  We really thought when we left this morning that our luck was finally turning because we were gonna have headwinds and fairly flat roads, but the weather decided to play tricks with us. Not even 10sec into our ride it starts to downpour. The heaviest rain we have seen all trip,...

Today’s ride was possibly one of the best of the trip solely for the fact that we only biked 3 miles before immediately leaving Michigan. Goodbye land of bumpy unpaved roads and no bathrooms. Hello Canada!!  Our morning started by waking up to rain on our tents. Usually a harbinger of doom for our day but luckily it stopped raining exactly when we had to leave our tents. It’s like the world wanted us to leave Michigan just as much as we did. We also met another biker as we were getting our bikes ready and found out he was on the last day of his trip! It’s crazy how close we are to finishing this adventure. The tentative date for finishing is the 26th but Dustin’s cracking the whip so we might be home even earlier than that! We had camped right on the border so one of the first things we did was cross the river via ferry. Our last ferry ride cost us $130 so we were incredibly excited when this one only cost us $3! On the other side of the river we were immediately greeted by possibl...

Hey y’all - Dustin here. Today we thanked the lord as we left our campsite behind the church and set off to grab some grub for breakfast. We stopped by Nick’s again but sadly the people working dinner shift last night weren’t there anymore so we had to get used to a new waitress - how dare they not work 24/7? Anyway we loaded up on pancakes, eggs, breakfast meats, and potatos before leaving the town of Durand at a cool 10am with the goal of 95 miles. Now you may be asking yourself, “ Wow Dustin! You guys must go pretty fast if you can go 95 miles starting at 10 and still finish at a reasonable hour!” And I would normally respond with yeah you know we go pretty quick given we have bags and elevation gains and normally headwinds for some reason even though we are going east. But today I’d just laugh because we didn’t get in until after 7 - and although Julia didn’t cry today - it may have been (at least to me) one of the hardest days of the trip… I guess the big man upstairs didn’t like ...