3-31-08 First Day

Today we woke up at 9:00 am, after about five hours of sleep. From there we went downstairs to eat breakfast and saw this group of French students who were visiting DC.   For the next hour or so we got organized as to what we were going to do today and helped set up the bicycles we had bought.   Since they all had to be assembled there was only time to get 4 of them ready for the ride to TC Williams, so Thomsen said the rest of us could run.  He was only kidding but with that little sleep last night I wasn't quite sure. We rode about five miles down to T.C. Williams High School, home of “Remember the Titans.” The school was amazing. We talked with the mayor, and the school principal, then took a tour of the school.   It’s a green high school and it has a garden on the roof and most of their classes have an environmental focus to them.  The students are very similar to those at Sealth, lots of ethnic groups, but the one thing we noticed is that the kids actually picked up litter in the halls and cleaned all the tables at lunch.  They seem really proud of their school and rightfully so.  We go a complete tour of the building and all of us were really impressed.  Too bad they don’t build schools like this in Seattle.  For sure Sealth isn't going to look like this. After the tour we began the long ride to South Boston, Virginia.  We only got about 40 miles and then we got hit by a thunderstorm and Thomsen pulled everybody off the bikes.  I have never seen it rain so hard in my life, we could hardly see the road and cars were just pulling over and stopping.  It continued like that all the way to South Boston so we didn’t really ride that much today, which was fine with me, cause Im still beat from the trip out and no sleep. We stayed in these amazing log cabins, with a view of the Stanton River.  It’s a really pretty park and the cabins are really cool. Tyrone is making dinner tonight and the rest of us are trying to help but he's really the only one who seems to know what he's doing.  After dinner Thomsen and Paul came over for a meeting and to go over everyone's assignments.  Im in charge of the daily updates, getting all the daily trip information that goes up on the website, stuff like mileages, names of rivers and creeks, passes, road conditions, weather etc.  Im also working with Tim and Tyrone on photo's and making sure the journals get done everyday.  Paul told us we needed to have all the stuff to him within an hour of getting to our hotel so we could get it up on the website, so it sounds like we're going to be pretty busy.  Thomsen made us all take notes and he reviewed everybody's job during the trip.  I think he's taking this more seriously than some of the riders are since a couple of them were kind of screwing around.  This should get interesting. After the meeting we went to bed for our first good nights sleep.  The beds are great and its perfectly quiet outside so Im going to go enjoy my sleep.