The Other Manhattan

Sorry for the delay, as many things have been happenin. As I mentioned toward the beginning of this summer, in "real life" I have spread myself too thin and allowed stress to dictate my life. One of the goals for this summer was to spend these seventy-something days worrying less and stressing less. Somewhere in this week, I lost that and allowed stress to kind of take over in Manhattan. Good times were had, but there was a constant cloud of thought around every word and action.  It was frustrating to see that no matter the environment that we place ourselves in, stressors are still stressors and I still have a lot of work to ease that out.  Done with inner thoughts, on the what happened those days:

We left Lawrence on Friday morning after a fun night exploring the town. Lots of stereotypical Kansas landscape of plains and fields and such. Just before we left, we realized we hadn't printed enough cue sheets, so Dan hand wrote a few.  Knowing I would be spending some time alone on the road, he drew a pretty cool friend onto my cue sheet. 

There were scattered storms with lightning throughout the day, so everyone came in with huge gaps between groups. I had to wait with the van until the last folks came in (at 6:10pm) and so many riders made it a tad more humorous how antsy/anxious I was to go more than 2 blocks from the van. After realizing certain (less than quality) questions only made the situation worse, Blake headed up a round of "asking even dumber questions than we would ask in real life." I threw a water bottle at him. We laughed. It eased ma tension a tad to be around folks who could make light of my stress. Good friends indeed. 

The next day, we split into three groups for a build day. The group I went with built and painted a shed and pulled out cabinets from a house that is about to be torn down. I got to use a table saw (a new favorite task). 

When we got back to host, we waited to meet some other cyclists staying at the same church. 4k for Cancer is another group that bikes cross country for philanthropic reasons. It was cool to spend a night with them, see what we have in common and what we do differently. Before they got there, Ashton and I had some fun with chalk: