Day 6: Oklahoma Can be Beautiful? I’ve always had a negative perception of Oklahoma. In high school, I read John Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath,” in which the Joad family escapes Oklahoma for opportunity. Last summer, I drove through Oklahoma only to camp in the Rocky Mountains. And as a University of Texas graduate, I’ve hardly […]

Day 5: Lovejoy High School “Lovejoy” represented the perfect name for the high school where we had our first rest stop today. We came in to an outpouring of joyous applause by high school parents who had lovingly prepared food and drink for us. With the blazing summer heat in Texas sapping our energy for […]

Day 4: Lost Luggage “You can tell a lot about a person by the way he/she handles lost luggage.” -Maya Angelou Kim, a guest at our Dallas fundraising event today, narrated this quote to me. Angelou also mentions two other “telltale signatures:” the way a person handles “a rainy day,” and the way a person […]

We had yet another spectacular breakfast at the East Side Church of Christ in Snyder, Texas this morning, but it was the women behind the counter, not the food on top of it, that made the experience the most memorable couple hours of my ride thus far. A collection of awesome ladies prepared biscuits, oatmeal, […]

It’s now the end of day four and the reality of the extent of our journey is hitting. But while I know the extent of everything I still cannot grasp the magnitude. Being in Houston has kept it feeing as if we will be back in Austin tomorrow night. Yet we keep peddling forward onward […]

There’s no better way to describe today’s ride then to quote the great Mohombi, who once said: “It’s going to be a bumpy ride” and proceeded to make a career out of it. Nothing we did today will bring us such fame, but our ride certainly wasn’t smooth. We found ourselves on a dirt road […]

Day 3: Science is Like Music “Science,” Barry- the director of the Lonestar Wind Symphony – assured me over a meal of sandwiches, cookies, and chips, “is like music.” Both require intense discipline for hours of work. Both result in a short but glorious payoff. Riding 80 miles takes about eight hours of pedaling that […]

As I sit down to write this I find myself in a roller rink full of twentysomethings doing their best to recreate the fifth birthday party they wish they had. Today’s 70-mile ride took us from Brownwood to Abilene, Texas, where we are staying at what has to be the coolest church facility in the […]

Temple Summit Recreation Center rock wall – my view for the night.   It couldn’t have played out better. Even with the couple bumps in the road we pulled through and had an amazing day. It was the first time in weeks that we say straight sunshine three days in a row. Riding as riding… […]

This morning featured another 4:30 AM wakeup call, followed by more emotional goodbyes and a 101-mile ride, so, in the interest of finally catching up on some sleep, you can expect a much shorter post. After a five-hour sleep that felt more like a 20-minute catnap, we enjoyed a quick breakfast provided by the 2014 […]