The Riders are Coming!

Finally! I can post in this thing.. It's been an incredible and extremely busy past couple days and has limited the amount of time I have for doing some personal things. At this point, the leaders have been sufficiently oriented, and the riders and just about done with their orientation. For the leader orientation, we went through all the different presentations we had to present to the riders, learned how to drive the van and trailer, and got a full run down of all the generalizations of the trip. It was really great to spend some quality time with just the leaders and Natalie and get to know each other a little bit more. We did bonding activities where we learned about each other's stressors, we went shopping for 30 people, which is a crazy experience!, and we even had an opportunity to go out to a restaurant and have fun time where we didn't talk about B&B. When I learned about the van and trailer, I even took the extra bonus challenge and learned how to parallel park it! If anyone needs their boat backed into the lake, I can definitely do it! 

As leaders, we also did a once over on the shake down ride that we had planned. It was really nice to have a chance to ride with my peeps before hitting the road for realz. 

And now, the riders are here! They got here on Friday, all bright eyed and bushy tailed, and by the time Friday was over, they seemed exhausted. They got here, checked in all their gear and then had time to socialize. They also managed to completely white wash the trailer in no time, making it very easy for us to finish that sucker hopefully before orientation is over. This seems like it's going to be a very efficient and fun group of people! After settling in, we played named games, watched some presentations about "A Day in the Life" and "Safety" and then we did one on the budget and affordable housing. After all of that, we had them split up into their chore groups and come up with short skits about the B&B policies that are in place. They were all so great and hilarious!! All the names of the groups are:

Octopi

The Odd Bod Squad

Slumbike Buildonaires

Killer Whales

Backstreet Bikers

After all that was over, they were able to make significant progress on the trailer and even managed to get us a "trip pet", Frank. Frank is what we call and Unipotato and he is painted on one side of the trailer, which is hilarious! On the back we have a nice big safety triangle. The sides are still coming together but one is the map of the US and the other is the major landmarks and cities we get to see! 

Unfortunately I'm exhausted but I'll try to catch up about the build site day we had today on tomorrow's blog! It was probably the best build site I've ever been to.