Day 11-Day 15: West Virginia

Day 11: Morgantown
The route into Morgantown began in a fashion less then promising. What was supposed to be a 24 mile jaunt over the state border turned into a logistical fiasco. The previous week our trip was offered sponsored admission to the Frank Lloyd Wright house Falling Water courtesy of the Speight family. Rami Speight was a 2005 HBC South rider who was killed by a car on the trip. She had been an architecture student at Yale, and in her honor her family annually sponsors South's excursion to the house turned museum. Falling Water is in Southwestern Pennsylvania about half an hour outside of Uniontown, thus for all 25 of us to travel to the house we had to shuttle the group in our 15 passenger van. Unfortunately, the leaders never quite finalized the plans for visiting Falling Water. Unlike other museums, you must make a tour reservation to enter the house, which we didn't learn until the first shuttle had reached the museum and been denied entry.
In situations like this, it comes in handy that we're a fundraiser for Habitat for Humanity. Andy - our theater major leader - begged and pleaded with the tour booth, "we're riding our bikes across the country for Habitat, we'll only be here for one day, it would mean the world to us to visit Falling Water, etc." Finally, they relented and stuffed our group into the pre-existing tour schedule. However, we needed to fit into their tours according to their availability so what should have been a three hour trip to Falling Water, became a six hour hurry-up-and-wait situation. By the time the last group returned to Uniontown from Falling Water it was nearly 2:00pm, and riding the 24 miles to Morgantown was completely out of the question. Thus for the second time in a day, the whole group got to shuttle again!
This blew. Crossing the state border stuffed into a crowded van on a 90 degree humid day has the same appeal as having teeth pulled. For starters, we're there to bike, not ride in the van for convenience of getting to the church on time. It also didn't help that in the midst of the Falling Water fiasco, we missed lunch, and as anyone who has hung around a bunch of athletes just before a meal, hungriness = crankyness. We were a van full of hot, sticky, moody, and cranky twentysomethings starting our West Virgina adventure on the proverbial wrong foot.