Day 15 - A new way to do laundry.

Well we all made it. Actually we did lose someone today.  There is a man named Bill from Boston that took ill a few days after we started and he was gone for like a week and then came back.  Today he started feeling ill again and had his son come and get him in the middle of the ride. He has been having a pretty hard time making the rides and I wonder if its the stress that causing his illness. We started at 7:30 this morning and we finished between 5:30 and 7:30. The first 20 miles were absolutely brutal. The last half of the ride was really beautiful. We rode by some dairies that were so pretty. They had these red barns and green pastures and corn fields and the smell of silage. It reminded me of home. Tomorrow we will be staying in a hotel so I should have internet to send a few pictures. Tonight I am just too tired to get things hooked up to send them.

We rode 74 miles today and are now in Hyde Park, NY. We are staying in a state park and I imagine because of labor day, this park is packed. I am laying in my tent writing this on the phone and it is super hot in here and humid. I don't know how I am going to sleep.

I have to tell you about something I learned from John, my friend from London. We stayed in the last motel and they didn't have laundry and then the last two nights we have been staying in state park campgrounds and they don't have laundry. I only brought three changes of biking cloths and because of the lack of laundries, I was running short of cloths. John told me that when you are in a pinch like this, you just wear your cloths into the shower and soap them up with your soap and then take them off and kind of wash them and rinse them and then just wash yourself. He said to put them on the floor of the shower and kind of stomp on them while you bath yourself, but I was not brave enough to do that. Actually, it works. The cloths smell pretty clean. With this humidity, you have to hang them somewhere on the bike while you ride to get them dry. If you hang them during the night, they are not much better in the morning.

We are staying next to this huge group of people camping and they are NOISY. I thinking it's going to be a long night.