Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Hershey, PA

1900 miles makes for a long drive, and it gets even longer as you're forced to drive slower and slower as you get further east. I'm not sure what I'm going to do without 75 mph speed limits - here's to going 35 on the highways!

I sat through hours of safety & orientation information, and got an overview of the lab I'll be working in for the next ten weeks - starting tomorrow. I also got to meet the other students in my program. There's only five of us, and it's a good group. Everyone else is from Pennsylvania and they're all engineering students, which kind of makes me the oddball.

After all that lecturing, it felt great to stretch my legs and check out the amusement park half of Hershey. The roads around here are great and so is the scenery. Everything's green, and there are some awesome old farmhouses along the way. I've also found that every road seems to connect to something else. It's a change coming from Colorado, where a lot of times the epic rides only have 1 or 2 routes like the National Monument or Mt. Evans.

Saturday, May 26, 2007

How do you spell "geak"?

So I'm leaving GJ tomorrow to drive across the country to Hershey, Pennsylvania. For those of you that haven't heard, I managed to get a chemical engineering internship at Penn State. I'm pretty stoked, although I know a lot of people out there are starting to wonder about my sanity.
Hmmm.... as I recall this site is supposed to be about cycling, so let me do a quick summary. Mesa State took 1st place (DII) in the Rocky Mountain conference, and my teammates Ticia Slusher and Chris Stuart managed to win the DII womens' and mens' individual titles. My personal season highlights included winning the Hell of the North Road Race, and taking 3rd in our conference.
The weekend before finals we took off for Lawrence, Kansas to compete in Collegiate Road Nationals. The weekend went well for Mesa State, with a team podium and Chris taking home the DII omnium title. After flatting and bonking in the RR, I pulled off a 10th place finish in Sunday's crit.