days 12-13

Day 12~ WindsdeeWe stayed up til 4am hanging out with Sam's friends (Sam is the couchsurfer we're stayin' with). It was so much fun, I spent most of the time just laughing at everyone's antics. At midnite this kid Joe showed me how you can go down to the pretzel factory down the street from Sam's apt. and get 4 pretzels for a dollar cuz they're hot off the press... there were like 50 kids with bikes just hanging out outside the factory eating tons of pretzels with all kinds of good toppings. so good.in the morning, sam's younger brother jack helped us make sure our bikes were in top shape with his mechanical expertise and his love of bicycle perfection. he fit me to my bike and rewrapped my handlebars with old inner tubes, which actually works amazingly well and is super waterproof! phil's bike is newly acquired from a used bike shop called Firehouse bikes, so he got some adjustments done on it too. but it is riding great and phil is actually like twice as fast now with a road bike that was built for touring instead of a mountain bike.On our way out of Philly we checked out a fair trade market in the Reading Terminal, with a pretty suave jazz pianist tearin' up the keys. then we hopped on a bike trail that took us 20 miles west to Valley Forge, bringing our 4-day visit to Philly to its inevitable end. on the bike trail we met an old guy riding a recumbent-type bike that was only a few inches off the ground. he let me try it out and it was suuuuper comfortable, but slightly freaky cuz everything seems to happen fsater when you're closer to the ground.around 8:30 we biked into a campground, but it was pretty much abandoned and creepy as hell. so a bit further down the road we asked a lady for some yard space and she offered us a spot under her pine tree. we scared her a little but she was really nice and genuine and after looking at our ids she seemed content to trust us.Day 13 (Thursday)Today was WETTTT. we continued following this pre-mapped out bike route that leads you west across the state of PA with convenient and easy-to-follow signage.... how nice is that! some crazy hills, our first taste of Amish country, and some massive rains that pervaded all of our shit and lead us to the dryers of a Lancaster laundromat. while i dried our stuff in Lancaster, Phil was blogging at a coffee shop and while doing so he found someone on warmshowers.org who was willing to host us rite then and there. Her name is Heidi and she is super nice and reminded me of a cross between Betsy and Anna (aka amazing). we had dinner with her, her roommate, and her roommate's fiance, and then i went for a walk thru Franklin and Marshall's campus. at 9 we went a few blocks down the road to see ironman in the park for free; it's a good thing it was free cuz it's the lamest movie ever.now we're back at heidi's house where it's beautifully warm and dry, and yet again i am just marveling at the amazing amount of kindness that has been bestowed on us in the past 2 weeks, a lot of the time from complete strangers. i only hope i can pass it on.a guy named nate asked me for my number today while i was out walking. it was weird cuz we only talked for like 30 seconds but i actually felt like we were really connected somehow. hahhaa who knows, it's impossible to tell in 30 seconds.Dia CatorceWe left Heidi's house around 10 and biked a couple blocks to the Central Market, which is like Lancaster's big indoor farmer's market. on the way we met a guy nnamed mike, who has done multiple xc bike trips in obscenely short amounts of time (think 1-2 weeks), and he's also spent a whole year biking the perimeter of the US... guh!phil went into central market while i listened to this kid Dmitri play guitar rite outside. he just moved here from russia a week ago as an exchange student, and he has an amazing voice! all his songs were in russian becuase he's just learning english. he played Russia's national song, and a song about "big love between one guy and two women". then another guy who was watching, and i, busted out our harmonicas and a trio was formed... it was so much fun!!!! all these little kids came by too, and they were dancing and it was hilarious and beautiful. dmitri asked if i would show him around lancaster, but i said i was leaving, so i just gave him my email address and he sed he would write, hehehe.we made some good time thru-out the day, and realized we could get to gettysburg pretty easily. ryder only lives 8 miles outside of gettysburg, in fairfield, and we called up bets and ryder to ask if we could stay there, and just like that we were hooked up again. we hung out in gettysburg for a few hours, mostly at a coffee shop with wifi. i talked to a kid named jay for like an hour about how traveling completely alters your life every single time you live somewhere new... it was pretty cool, he had just spent a year in egypt. then i talked to another guy about how gettysburg is becoming more and more about commercial possibility than anything else.we got to ryder's house just in time for phil to watch the end of the hockey game with the musselman family. they were incredibly nice and funny and we got to hang out with the chickens and goats and have a paul simon singalong with cody, ryders sister.