"Any Dream Will Do"

I cannot get over how nice people are to us. We had wonderful hosts again in Boonville and one of them was a state champion in ping-pong, so we got to watch quite the show.

From Boonville we headed to Palermo, NY, which is just a small town in upstate NY. It is really funny how we thought of New York City when we thought of NY, but it turns out the rest of the state looks a lot like Wisconsin. The ride to Palermo was really nice and we had good weather. I also had my fist "local" ice cream stop and basically got a pint of ice cream for $2.50. It was delicious.

After Palermo came Rochester, NY. We were all very excited to be in a real city again when we arrived. It took us a while to arrive though, and it was by far the most interesting ride so far. It rained once again; I am very tired of riding in wet clothes all day. The first half of the day was fairly hilly and kind of challenging, but it flattened out after lunch. And that is when the excitement began.

Once it got flat after lunch, we were on a fairly busy highway. 5 of us girls had decided to ride together and we were kind of cruising along when Abby said, "Ali, you're from Kansas, is that a tornado?". And although it was not in fact a tornado, it was a mean looking sky. We decided to ride on anyway, and just as it started to downpour we realized the highway we were on got a lot busier and now had entrance and exit ramps... I obviously handled this situation in my typical manner and started laughing hysterically. We decided to pull over for a minute and call the van and he informed us we were going the right way, so we continued on. In doing so we got a lot of honks and were somewhat fearful for our lives, but we made it out unscathed and had a good story to tell at the end of the day.

After the adverture on the highway, we still had 20 miles to go to get to Rochester and those turned out to be a very long 20 miles. I had never been on my bike for 90 miles straight and I very much so wanted to be off of it. The ride ended in a nice suprise though: we found out we were staying in dorms! This meant showers in the building, a bed, and sharing a room with only one other person, all rare treats on Bike and Build. We also got to go out that night and hang out which was a lot of fun.

The next day we had a build day. I was assigned to help put siding on a house, which is something I had never done before. It wasn't as hard as I thought it would be and I think we were actually very helpful. We managed to do the entire front of the house, so it was cool to see what we had done. The men that we were working with on that site were really nice people and it was fun to work with them all day. One of the best features of this trip is getting to know the people on, surrounding, and supporting the ride.