Lynden, WA - Build Day

The Habitat build site was located in Sumas, WA, a short van ride away. It turns out that they've been moving faster on the duplex they've been working on, so the jobs that they reserved for the 30 of us to work on were already finished. That's a good thing since it means the family can move in that much sooner, but it also meant that the site only needed 12 of us for four hours of work. The group that went to the build site put the finishing touches on the house, which meant moving dirt, our favorite.

I stuck back at the church with the rest of the gang to do end of trip clean-up on the trailer and the van. Nothing much to note, just finally giving everything a good once over. The most frustrating part was finding items that would've been much more useful had we known we had them. There were two rolls of duct tape which would've been perfect for all the broken tent poles we'd bee dealing with. I found a rubber mallet which meant we could've used that to pound in the tent stakes instead of using large rocks and looking like cavemen. Highlights from the clean-up in pictures.

We emptied everything out of the trailer. For all of us, it was the first time we had seen the back of the trailer, since there's normally a row of plastic bins with our food in the back. It looks like a lot of space, but gear and food for 30 people quickly fills it up.

Arianna, Quang, Kathy, and Isaiah cleaning and degreasing our bike tools. They've gotten lots of use over the course of the trip, most often by our resident mechanic, Anson. Without him, our bikes would be in a lot shabbier shape.

The infamous tents. The task was to inventory the tents and see which were a complete set and able to be reused for next year and which needed parts or just plain needed to be dumped.  It was quite the production to match all the pieces together, but somehow managed to put a majority of them together, but it wasn't pretty. That's Dae, Kevin and Pen attempting to make one work.

Laura coming out from the kitchen with a clean camping stove in hand. Her and Kristen took a toothbrush and a bucket of soap to it.

Since both groups had half days, we all had the afternoon off. Most people spent it at the library to catch up on internet. A good majority of people spent the time making phone calls to finally make calls at a decent hour (for those on the east coast) and to talk before we incurred roaming charges when we entered Canada. I went to get a haircut since it's been overheating underneath my helmet as of late. 

The church hosted a potluck dinner for us. Afterwards I gave our Bike and Build presentation and then we also had a presentation from the local Habitat chapter. It was nice to learn more about it and see a slideshow of the building process of the home that half the people went to work on earlier. 

For the evening, it was same old same old. Some people went off to watch Braveheart. Others watched Arrested Development. I went to go satisfy a pop craving (Thanks to Derek's mom for the chicken pad thai leftovers which was the cause of the pop craving). Others journaled and read. But my favorite was watching people show each other different ab exercises. It really was just a regular evening, you wouldn't even think that we were at the end of the trip with only two days of riding left. 

Canada, here we come.