june 21-23

ummm so i think today is june 23rd yes it must be. we spent the day hangin out with Pete, another kid from Montana! he lives in Rochester, MI, about 26 miles north of Detroit. he lives in a suburban subdivision but there is an absolutely beautiful park a block from his house called the Stony Creek Metro Park where i walked around this afternoon. there are tons of trails and big trees and some crazy birds makin noises i've never heard before. i tried to do some meditation but there were mosquitoes and mountain bikers up the wazoo.
pete drove us into detroit and on the way we stopped at the Chrysler World Headquarters, which is a massive complex on 300 acres of land. the auto industry is falling apart tho, and unemployment is 15% in detroit and its population has gone from like 1.2 million to 700 million in the past five years. the city looks pretty depressed in a lot of areas but there are still a lot of super rich ppl living in the area too. we drove up to the river and could see ontario just across it, which is crazy i didnt know detroit was just a skinny river's throw from canada!
yesterday we spent the day biking from perrysburg mi (near toledo) toward detroit, but we only made it to about 20 miles south and then pete picked us up in a minivan so we could just roll our bikes right into the trunk. it was his birthday so phil and i ordered a birthday cheese pizza for him right before he got to us. unfortunately we were so hungry that it was phil and i who ended up eating basically the entire birthday pizza. we biked past michigan's only nuclear power plant, which looked pretty intense and high in temperature.
the day before that we biked from vermilion to perrysburg i believe. perrysburg is the hometown of a woman named Susan who hosted us with only a few hours notice. we got to her house around 9 and she made us some pasta and salad and leftover chicken and roasted vegetables and then gave us strawberries and ice cream for dessert... dang! she loves photography and has covered all the walls in her house with hers' and other people's photos. she is also a wine aficionado. she left at 6:30am so she had said goodbye to us the night before, but she came home on her lunch break and we were still at her house hahaha. we didn't actually leave till like 2.
supposedly tomorrow we're starting a new precedent and leaving at 9am. we're only goin' about 50 miles to the college town of Ann Arbor, but we wanna be able to check it out during the day, and we also wanna prepare ourselves for the 100 mile day after that where we try to make it from Ann Arbor to Kalamazoo.
i can't believe we've already gotten ourselves into michigan with only a couple short rides here and there! my body feels full of energy, like it's radiating energy, and i never feel very tired or sore or anything. i couldn't ask for better health! my body feels very alive, i think it was meant to do this type of thing.
i am trying to spend a lot more time appreciating the earth and looking at it as a living being in all aspects. every time we take a break i just love to lie in the grass and have my whole body on the earth's surface and just kind of imagine it breathing under me and around me.