Team Presta/Shrader - Shrader/Presta

So, funny thing about leaving on the 19th.... its hard to do when your cycling buddy does not have a bike because the gems that work at the Amtrak in D.C refused to take it, despite the fact that the amtrak website states that it does in fact allow bicycles and that they will even package them for you. I currently have a few bones to pick with Amtrak, not to mention the fact that it was a 3am train, its not like it was rush hour and the train was packed. Big bummer. We are now waiting for the kind people of fed-ex to safely deliver the beloved Trek 2200 to the Boston REI. Patience is a virtue.
But its probably just as well because now we will be leaving on the first official day of summer which is also the longest day of the year and is know to AT hikers as 'naked hiking day'. Our first day will put us in at about 65 miles to the national park located in sturbridge.
We found out that one our favorite AT hostels, called the Birdcage, is located just off of route 20 in pittsfield, which also just happens to be 85 miles from Sturbridge, when you know that you will be sleeping in a real bed with the possibility of a shower, the day takes on a new awesome and positive ambiance.
Also, in the AT culture there is something known as 'slackpacking', this is when someone either a hostel owner or friend or whoever offers to hold a bunch of your gear so that you can cover your days miles with just the bare essentials, this is an awesome break for thruhikers because you can usually cover much bigger days and you literally just have snacks and water for the day. That concept being introduced, we invented and became very excited about the concept of 'slack biking', this came about when we started recieving calls from friends telling us about their friends who lives in towns we will be passing through.
So, waiting for the bike, very ready and excited to pedal my heart out of here, to partake on one more epic adventure before I have to come kicking and screaming into a steady job and the 'real world'. I was flipping through an old journal and found two quotes that I wrote down years ago, that are oddly appropriate for this trip, so I'm going to be cheese ball and leave you with them, hopefully the next entry will be from the road:

'every school child in America is taught to identify with those enterprising men who, for better or often for worse , plunged their various flags into this land so many centuries ago...And even though we've heard phrases like 'last frontier' and 'final frontier' and 'last best place' for ages, we all still carry some frontier within us. That's the reason that no matter what direction I, and the other people like me, are traveling in our city-hopping lives, we're always headed west'
-Uneasy Rider

'I often come across some variation of the phrase "I went there to find myself', and I always suspect that the opposite was the case. Wilderness shows us by its very essence precisely what we are not and we go into it to escape precisely what we are: social creatures bound to grand systems that we must engage with or be ruined by'
-When We Were Kings