Welcome to Montana!

Since getting into montana we have had some interesting hosts and some good times. I will try to write down a few of these here.

Montana is one more of the many states that I haven't ever been too. At first I was not a huge fan of Montana becuase it is a little bit boring, and although it is a desert, it has more mosquitos than anywhere else I have ever been to. Well anyway, we have been in Montana for almost four days now. We were met in Culbertson on the first day with one of the friendliest congregations we have had (That is saying something). They let us use their personal laundry machines, fed us extrememly well, and even donated several hundred dollars of repair work when the van broke down yet again.

The next day our Pastor was a bicycle fanatic. He used to lead tours for Adventure cycling, and rode all around the country on a tandem with his wife. He also helped repair some peoples bicycle equipment, and even gave Isiah a new pair of handlebars. That church was pretty cool.

The next night, in Glasgow, we stayed in an church that was called simply "Evangelical Church." The youth pastor who greeted us was very friendly and showed us around the church. The church had a full basketball quart, all sorts of AV equipment, a stage full of musical instraments, pool, ping pong, a very large brand new sancturary, and an older one set up with a huge projector screen where he had a wii and all sorts of fun games involving shooting people. Playing shooting-people-games in a former church sancturary first struck me as a little strange, but hey, the pastor set it up. What impressed me the most was when the youth pastor told me that almost all of the new building had been donated/built by volunteers from within the church. I spent the last hour before going to bed playing drums with Ian before finally getting a little bit of sleep.

By this time things on the road were getting to a level of boring that I had thought not possible. When they say that Montana is Big sky country, they arent joking. And the reason why they say that is becuase there is nothing to look at but the sky, well, there is also grass and a few hills. We can see things at least 15 miles in the distance, this can often take about an hour to get to, so we just ride on for an hour staring at the same thing. But anyway the group decided to try and figure out some more fun stuff to do to keep the riding interesting, so we decided to play a stupid game called assassins. All this did is make people become completely skitzafrenic (yeah, I don't know hot to spell, well I don't care). So the day of the 5th nobody would get off their bike at lunch for fear of being killed. Also lunch was right next to a lagoon, and four seconds after I stopped my bike at lunch I had about 10 mosquitoes on my legs. I just filled up my waterbottle, grabbed some bread and left. So after about 60 miles of biking and no stopping me and the three people (Dan, Kevin, and Reed) with me were kinda tired. We stopped to read a historic interest sign about three miles out of Saco, and some random guy in a truck told us that there was a hot springs and pool about one mile down a side road that we should go to.

It sounded like fun so we went. We ended up spending over two hours at the springs, swimming and talking to the man and his wife who ran the place. It just randomly turned out that this guy was on the board of a local Fuller Center for Housing branch, and had been involved with affordible housing for years and years. They didn't even make us pay to use the springs. The man was also running for Montana House distric 35 as a Democrat. We wished him luck, it is these sort of encounters that make keep the trip interesting.

-John R

North Dakota

Hey everybody.

If anyone is actually reading this (other than you Mom), or attempting to, you might have noticed that I have been posting very little lately. This is due to two reasons. The first reason is that I have been very busy. For some reason, even though I don't really have much that I have to do each day, I never seem to time to do anything except eating, sleeping, and biking. The second reason is because I see the wisdom in these words spoken by Voltaire, "The best way to be boring is to leave nothing out." So basically I am just trying to keeping from boring any one.

But anyway, there has been a lot of exciting things happening recently. Two nights ago I woke up from the floor of a womens bathroom in a National park. A week ago we stayed on a legit farm, and I got to ride a horse, a tractor and meet Isiah's wonderful family. Most of these events have already been extensively journaled so I wont repeat all of the details, but long story short North Dakota has proved to be much more exciting than I expected, although I was not expecting much.

We have also gone through some very interesting areas. The Badlands in western North Dakota are like nothing I have ever seen before. They remind me of New Mexico. We have also spent a fair amount of time going through Native American reservations, most of which are a little different from everywhere else. New Town especially was strange. It is in the middle of a tribal reservation, and it is currently also in the middle of a huge oil boom. Every thirty seconds or so we were passed by a extra long tanker truck. I wandered around the town a little bit, and basically the only people that I saw were poor looking native Americans, Bikers (the real kind) and almost cartoonist looking oil-men.

As always, our hosts have been almost ridiculously generous. I am a little worried that something might happen to my bike because we are well over 200 or 300 miles from a bicycle shop. But at least all of this has given me things to think about while I ride my way through the mind-numbingly boring northeastern part of Montana.

I probably ought to be posting more, but I have been very lazy so far. It can be very disorienting living out of a bag and sleeping in a new place every day. This and the fact that we have been in the middle of nowhere for the last few weeks have made it so many of us do not know what day it is or what is going on in the outside world.

Right now I am in a library in the wonderful town of Lockport in the western part of New York. I am in a beautiful public library building on one of the public computers. Libraries are the most common place for us to find the internet, and often the towns we stay in are so small that the libraries are within walking distance to where we are staying. Tonight we are staying in the basement of a gigantic church. When we walked in there were cookies waiting for us, which are always greatly appreciated.

The ride today would have been great it it hadn't poured for two hours around lunch time. These last few weeks it has rained on us just about every day. Riding in the rain is not very fun, it gets cold, and if you are riding behind someone else and open your mouth you get a tasty mixture of dirt and water sprayed into your mouth. While it has rained most days, most of the time it doesn't rain the whole day, and we still get non-rainey parts and all of the fun that comes with it. For example today we passed a fresh fruit stand at a farm that was selling just picked cherries for really cheap. I bought a bag full of them and ate all of the way to the church.

It is not time for me to go to dinner, tonight like most nights members of the church congregation have provided a pot-luck dinner for us. I hope that everyone has a happy fourth of July tomorrow. We will be in Niagara Falls, relaxing for a change.

-John R
July 3rd 2008

First Post!

Well, I may have been late to hop on the blogging train, but since all of the other kids were doing it, I didnt want to feel left out, so here I am, typing away on a library computer in the middle of some town in New Hampshire that I had never heard of untill a few days ago. The trip has been fun so far. The story generally goes like this: Wake up, eat, clean, bike, bike, eat, bike, eat, nap, eat, talk, sleep... But everyone once in a while they mix it up a little bit, by throwing in an extra bike, or an eat; or by jumping into a river, or scrambling around on half finished roofs.

Before I ramble on any more I ought to introduce my self and describe the purpose of this blog. My name is John Romanishin, and I just escaped my first year at MIT. Before college, I could be found in the nice little town of Norman in central Oklahoma. This summer I had not really planned anything for myself untill I heard about Bike and Build. Once I did hear about it, I decided that it sounded a great thing to do. Since I already enjoy biking, and building things, the whole idea made a large ammount of sense. In terms of previous experience, I had spent the last semester racing for the MIT cycling team. I also have just biked extensivly around both central Oklahoma, and eastern Massachussutts. Bike and Build encourages us to keep these blogs during the trip so that our friends and family, and anyone with nothing better to do can read about our cross country trip. So this is my first Post, I am now about to be kicked out of this library, so I will have to leave, but next time I can begin to talk about some of the great things that we have already done, and the prodigious ammounts of amazing food that we have consumed.

-John Romanishin