The key characteristic of our time at Evelyn’s house was nurturing. We hadn’t actually seen Evelyn since we stayed at her house at the start of the St. Augustine to San Francisco trip last year, so it seemed really fitting to be there again, doing another big trip. We love Evelyn’s house – it’s roomy and airy and peaceful, all things that tired cyclists living on the road love to have.
Starting from the afternoon we arrived, we had awesome, simple, healthy food. Evelyn certainly gets our Hero of the Day for several days running for so patiently driving us around on errands, and thinking through places where we could get what we needed. We had one, and maybe two long days with stops at multiple health food stores and the like. We stocked up on great nuts and seeds and dried fruit to make our own trail mix; we finally found powdered polenta and couscous; and we even found Avon Skin So Soft lotion, which had been recommended to us by a number of folks as being a great mosquito and no-see-um repellant. The woman at the Avon kiosk also recommended a mosquito repellant they have that uses Picaridin, which comes in a spray bottle. She told us that they are “sending it to the boys in Iraq”.
Not only did we score on food and on mosquito repellants, but we looked for a long time at various options to keep the squirrels and ants and birds out of our food. We finally settled on some screw-top plastic dishes put out by Ziploc. Then of course, we had to come home and re-package everything so we could pack it in our trailers.
In between catching up on things and doing our errands, we celebrated Chelsea’s birthday with Evelyn by going out to our favorite Mexican restaurant. We even had a pitcher of margaritas, and ate so much we thought we’d have to roll home. We figured we wouldn’t be eating like that again for a long while…
Another major high point of being at Evelyn’s house was the packages we had had sent to her house. We got our stove and fuel from REI, along with our Figure Nines and tent stake mallet and lightweight tarps, and we got the Patagonia dresses from Travel Country. We also had another “care package” from our sojourn in Longpoint – a whole box of Arbonne products, donated by the mother of our waitress at the restaurant.
Arbonne is a product line of nutritional and face and body products that is botanically based. For the purist, it’s not strictly botanical (pure), so it’s good to know that before you buy (it’s not easy to tell from their materials and their approach). We were interested in their sunscreen, as we are always on the lookout for anything that works really well, but when we opened the package we found an astonishing array of products. We got lip balm, sunscreen, two types of “herbal” foot care lotion, handfuls of samples of hair shampoo and conditioner, handfuls of vitamin and mineral pill packets, a big container of orange fiber shake mix, a packet of herbal tea, body lotion, after skin lotion, and a handful of samples of various face lotions and masques, etc. I was overwhelmed by the variety and quantity! I knew just by the weight that we couldn’t carry it all with us, so I saved out some of the orange fiber shake mix in a Ziploc, tucked away the lip balms in our back-up supplies, and sent the rest off to Mark in New Hampshire. I figured we would have a chance to try the products out at his house, and decide if we wanted to keep any of them.
After our final trip to Wal-Mart, we settled in for our re-packing binge. We knew we were leaving a lot heavier than we started! But oh, we were so rested and nurtured…
We do have to add a final note – Charlie, Evelyn’s boyfriend, gets Hero of the Day for a major act of unselfishness. When we arrived at Evelyn’s house, it was the day the new Harry Potter book came out. Charlie came home at the end of the day with book in hand! We oohed and aaahed over it, and of course Chelsea gravitated to it instantly (meaning she got nothing else done because her nose was buried in the book). We awoke in the morning to find the book with a note from Charlie – telling Chelsea she could take the book with her!