The trip with details

I have a bunch of pictures that tell the story of our trip home from Arkansas to Michigan to New Hampshire.

For starters, from Arkansas to Michigan is a long long drive. We'd stayed with the nicest family in all of Russellville, AR and they loved chocolate and everything with sugar in it. Tommy ate more candy in 15 minutes than I've ever seen anyone eat in one day. The sugar went to his head and now he's acting a bit loopy as seen here.

Rich was in the best of moods throughout the week, primarily because his lady-friend Kate was in town. She smoked the Tri-Peaks criterium and the two of them had a nice trip in the back of the van all 16 hours back to Michigan. Dang, that's a long drive. They were plenty quiet and Rich mostly slept on the floor while Kate had the luxury of the bench. Fun times.

Many hours later, we all arrived at the Olson's and unpacked all of our goodies into their front yard. Robbie had left his car at the Olson's as well as his trailer and a bunch of gear from his car. Tons of stuff, to be exact. We spent most of the morning repacking his car for the journey back to NH, which was made possible by the Olson's love of coffee. They have some excellent coffees and coffee makers, so we were well caffeinated for the pack and early part of the trip. Robbie put in the first effort and drove a monstrous 8 hours or so before I took the helm. By then his coffee had worn out, as seen here.

One of my biggest surprises, as mentioned in the previous entry, was that going into Canada was tougher than going into the US. Robbie and I waited in a pretty lengthy line to get back from Canada to the US, but the line going the other way was five times longer! Those Canadian mounted police are a tough group. My favorite question is "Do you have any firearms?" Well, duh, of course you're going to answer no, whether or not you actually have them. There are no dogs, no searches, nothing crazy like that... just the question.

Robbie had been asking the team throughout this southern swing if we could eat at Hardey's for a Philly Cheesesteak Thickburger. The ad makes it look absolutely enormous - it's like two huge sandwiches in one: a cheesesteak and a big ol' burger. Sadly the actual burger looked nothing like the ad, but it was still tasty and Hardey's ranks high on my favorite burger chains.

Robbie and I raced the world famous Hartford (CT) Downtown Criterium on Sunday May 28th. There were some pretty reputable riders there and some hot shot local teams. Davide Fattini was there, some dude on AEG, Fior di Frutta had something crazy like 13 racers, Boston Scientific was in full force, and Nerac.com/OutdoorLighting was hosting the race, so they had a sizeable squad. Long story short, FdF lead it out from about 5 laps to go; Robbie tried to pimp them with 1/2 lap to go, which was an awesome move because he gapped the field, but unfortunately Mike Cody was right on Robbie's tail, so he had a free ride to the finish. I was sitting 5th wheel and came away with a stormingly fast sprint to take 2nd. Mike 1st, Me 2nd, Robbie 3rd. The rest of results.

Not bad since we just had the two of us and FdF had 13 dudes.

It's Mayo's birthday today! We're in Vermont and she turns 23 today. She's awesome and tomorrow she's coming with us to Philly. Goooood times.