Day 4: Waverly, Virginia: "I'll Make Ya Snort"

As I hoped, sleep last night was awesome. I even had some vivid dreams, which is not normal for me.

but of course sleep had to end eventually. we awoke to a Justin Bieber remix and got ready for the Road. I made good sure to get lots of sunscreen on today, because I already have a fierce farmer's tan going.

At our pre-route meeting Emma, who did the research for the next town, got up to speak, hesitated, and said "So Waverly is...really small". This was certainly not an exaggeration. The town has just a little over two-thousand residents and is about 3.1 square miles in size, surrounded on all sides by big beautiful farmland. It was obvious that at this point we were moving away from the coast and into rural Virginia. There were huge open fields of wheat with the occasional run-down tractor or barn rising up from the horizon. Clouds of flies moved like wisps of smoke over the wheat. We stopped and had our picture taken with a pretty legit scarecrow, and made sure to put a helmet on his head so he didn't feel out of place. And of course there was the majestic farmland fauna. A pack of buzzards pecked at something ripe right off the side of one of our first roads. A dog chased one of our trip leaders, Alyson, for a good 50 feet.

I hummed along with the front-group all through the morning, and we blasted the first 20 or so miles in a little over 1.5 hours, stopping for "lunch" at 9:40. We danced to the Darkness and made interesting peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I'm personally a big fan of the PB&J&Potato Chips. Tomorrow I intend to try out some PB&Oreos.

I stayed with the front pack the entire ride, which was great for a couple reasons. First, it's helping me prove to myself that I'm prepared to do this ride. Second, and more important, however, riding in front allows us to stop pretty much whenever we please to soak in the sights.

A few miles after our "lunch" stop we hit a solid 3 or 4 miles of pure gravel, but miraculously none of us caught flats. It did, however, make for plenty of turbulence, to where I couldn't help but start singing the "Indiana Jones" themesong.

After the gravel we rolled through a beautiful field with a flat, straight road which provided the perfect space for me to practice that no-hands biking that cool bikers do. I'm pretty decent but I need to work on my swivel. After that we roared through a tshaded forest, and then immediately following found ourselves riding along the edge of the prettiest swamp I've certainly ever seen. black water, green trees, trunks rising from the water, and turtles swimming all around. We hung our feet over the edge of a dock/shack and enjoyed the serenity.

When we finally decided to hit the Road again Waverly was a mere 3 miles away. We got there around 1 and decided to kill time by exploring the town, which was, as Emma anticipated, pretty bare. We hit up a McDonalds and then sought out "The First Peanut Museum in America", which was actually still closed for another hour or so. Instead we got our picture with the creepy Uncle Sam in the front, and then rolled back to the church we were staying at for epic naps.

I woke up about an hour later in a puddle of my own drool, and meandered into the main hall where Aileen, another one of our trip leaders taught me how to play cribbage, a card game, which, as Derrick put, is played by "really, REALLY old people and mid-westerners". It took a while to catch on because it's, like, 3 games inside of a game, but still, quite fun.

Cribbage was followed by a fried-chicken dinner. Heaven. Pure heaven.

Following dinner the team had a spontaneous massage-party right on the steps of the church. There was a hilarious amount of innuendo. This is honestly probably my highlight from the trip so far because we were all laughing hard. You could hear the personal bubbles bursting. I also picked up a reputation right away as a champion massage-giver *Brush brush*.

We strolled into town and I got a yoohoo from a gas station. Since that was about all there was to do we turned right around, but not before the cops caught up with us and told us it probably wasn't a good idea to be in town this late at night.

And that leads us to this moment. I'm listening to Harry Manx and I hear laughter upstairs, so if you'll excuse me, I think I've written plenty for the day.