Virginia Beach Day one...

Day One:
Well we all ended up meeting each other yesterday. There were a couple faces who I memorized on the home website, but for one reason or another were not able to make it all the out here. Overall it started pretty well, met my first two bike and builders in the airport, Julie and Justin, they are friends from Nashville, and after seeing them claiming two bags from the oversized luggage department, I took an educated guess that we were heading the same way. Sure enough we were, but bikes due tend to take up a lot of room and when I met up with Aaron and Alicia we had a hard enough time trying to pack our bikes into the station wagon, (partly due to the monstrosity I purchased online that disguised itself as a bike box.) After meeting with the group I realized that I had brought way too much equipment down and would have to send some of it back. It is just one of the realities one faces when trying to organize and plan something from the bush.
After getting my stuff situated we ended up schmoozing with the rest of the riders and ended up playing some “icebreakers.” Now in all honesty these were some of the weirdest icebreakers I have ever played, we started off with the basic name and interesting fact, then changed over to what we had in common with each other, and finally it escalated to a game where we definitely invaded each others personal space, but we were all laughing while we did it. Overall it was one of the most effective icebreakers I have ever played because although it was awkward, after going through the motions of either dancing up on someone, holding them up bride and groom style, and then airplaning on them as they lay on the ground, we found that the ice was literally broken. We all had a good laugh and everyone was ready for our next activity of learning the rules and procedures.
We broke up into groups for chores and my group consists of Kate, Nick, Julie, John, and myself. It sounds like we are a pretty solid group interested in helping each other, Nick has been a chef prior to this, so our days for dinner should be particularly tasty. (Which I’ll add is pretty good because my diet is so bland in the bush I doubt anyone would appreciate my meals of plan oatmeal, mixed with the odd combo of crystal light chicken, but we will see what happens.) Julie and Kate were worried about the large proportion of boys in their group for cleaning, so I guess the onus will fall on us to make sure we exceed expectations.
We received a dinner donated to us from Chipotle and it was pretty tasty, I personally cant get enough restaurant food after being out of the bush. Any food that I don’t have to do the dishes for and is tasty is fine by me. We wound up the day having a meeting with some alumni riders who sang praises about the summer we are going to have which I am pretty sure spread the excitement from rider to rider as we listened to tales from trips past. Afterwards we broke out a game of Apples to Apples and had some fun shooting the breeze while we made our matches. After completing the whole deck of cards we ended up claiming spots of the floor for snoozing. I succumbed to the jetlag and was out like a light. Man alive what a day!