Past Couple of Days

So it's been a couple of days since I have posted an update, but things have been pretty busy. Sunday we finished up leader orientation and Monday morning we prepared for rider arrival that afternoon. And then...riders arrived.

It was awesome to finally meet in person the people that I had been talking on the phone with for the past couple of months. It was a bit hectic with everyone arriving. Directing people upstairs to check and put their bike and the room down stairs, then helping everyone assemble their bikes who shipped it. It made me realize that I knew a lot more about bikes than I thought I did. After we went though the check in process it was time to really kick off orientation and what better way to do that than to do ice breakers. Yeah they are cheesy but they are oh so effective. It was nice because in addition to getting to know names I also started to learn about personalities and who gets my humor and who doesn't.

After the ice breakers we did a day in the life of presentation, which I guess some of you are probably interested in too, so I'll give you a more simplified version.

6:00am- Wake up, pack up, clean up
6:45am- Breakfast
7:30am- Morning huddle (go over cue sheet[directions], talk about city research, fun things to do and anything that riders need to be aware of with hosts.
8:00am- on the road
Ride, eat lunch stop and do interesting things
4:00pm- arrive at host, shower, explore the town
6:30pm- dinner, affordable housing presentation
7:30pm- Free time, affordable housing curriculum meeting, other meetings as needed
11:00pm- lights out

Repeat for almost three months.

After the day in the life presentation we went over policies and bike safety. Afterwards dinner and a presentation by Charleston County Habitat for Humanity. We also had our first Bike & Build presentation which was presented by the leaders. It wasn't as polished as I would have liked but it worked. That closed the riders day, but the leaders were diligently working in the background making sure everything was ready for the next day. LIghts out at 11:00.

We woke up at about 6:45 and had the riders wake up at 7:00 and practice packing their things. Our first wake up song of the summer, The Sylvers, Hotline. If you are not familiar with this song, I would recommend that NOT familiarize yourself with it. Yes I know we did it to the riders, but that was because Brendan had made numerous references to the song and was trying to sing everything that we were doing to the tune. We felt the riders had a right to know where it came from.


After waking up and packing up, we had breakfast, which was leftover bagels, bananas and apples, a pretty standard breakfast by Bike & Build standards. After breakfast, there were more ice breakers and then we split them into their chore groups and did some presentations that were better suited for smaller groups, such as a review of chore group responsibilities, bike maintenance, bike cleaning and the always important Bike & Build elevator pitch. After we finished the presentations up it was a quick demonstration on fixing flats and then getting ready for the shake down ride.

Shake down ride went extremely well. There are definitely some people who have not trained like they should and we need to get accustomed to riding in groups as many of us trained by ourselves for the ride, but all in all they looked pretty good. After our ride, we showered, grabbed some lunch and painted the trailer. Then we did our final two presentations, health and hygiene and affordable housing. We had dinner and more or less called in a day.

Tomorrow we build with Charleston Habitat and Thursday we have our Tire Dip ceremony and hit the road. I'm pumped and can't wait to get the ride underway.

-Jeremy