By Ben Nitkin on
Happy Independence day! It may have been three weeks ago, but I'm writing about it now.
I'm going to skip captions today. The photos mostly run in the same order as the text below. Enjoy!
We started the day with a very patriotic van: overnight, a few riders filled the van to the brim with red, white, and blue balloons. When the leaders found out, they made us clean the thing out (after laughing quite heartily). Watching 20-somethings running around with pointy things trying to burst balloons wandering off in the morning breeze is ... something.
The ride itself was fairly short and had exactly one memorable section. The worst gravel road we've seen yet. One fellow in a pickup pulled over to warn us that the road was out.
He wasn't wrong. After riding over five miles of gross wet clay-ish mud that clogged my brakes and caked my frame, the road vanished. Heavy rains and also some normal rain flooded a nearby river. The flood waters ate away at the road until there wasn't any road left. The signs said Road Closed. It could have said Road Missing.
We all walked around on the 4' of grass left between the gaping hole and the barbed-wire fence.
When we arrived in Fountain (a suburb of Colorado Springs where Habitat has a development) the leaders had arranged a patriotic afternoon. Or I think that's what it was. Amanda arranged for a hot dog eating contest, and we prepared a nice dinner including fresh watermelon.
I wanted to watch fireworks. Getting anywhere from Fountain is challenging. The population density is low enough that public transit doesn't exist, and we couldn't find a taxi. Another rider found that Uber sort of served the area and managed to hail a ride when an Uber driver got close. The six of us - Dustin, Alex, Zoe, Zoe, Andrew, and I - arrived downtown around 7pm, a while before the fireworks. We found concessions, some fun fairground rides, and a great view.
The fireworks started around 9. They were perfect. Right overhead, but not dangerously close. And since CO Springs is sizable, the show was impressive.
It was a good day. Except that Uber's surge pricing stranded us for a while. It went away after half an hour.