The ride into Moab was gorgeous, but a bit lost on me as I was battling a migraine for the majority of the day. We were out of cell phone service for most of the day, and through a mix up with the van I missed being picked up twice. It was kinda horrible, but I booked the last twenty miles at about 27mph, showered in a daze and promptly passed out on my thermarest in a back room of the church at about 8:00. I woke up feeling back to normal, in fact probably better then normal because of the large amount of sleep I lucked into! Moab was our first break after a nine day stint of riding through colorado. We were fortunate enough to have back to back days in town, with our first being a build day and our second being a real day off. It was nice to feel so normal, sleeping in a little, grabbing coffee, poking around the bookstore...in short, a much needed break! First I'll tell you about the build day. We were all excited to get to work on/see our first straw bale home. Hands down the coolest site we've been on this whole trip. We met with a family who are building their own home along with Rebuilding Together, an affordable housing program in Moab. We learned all about the architecture planning that goes into all the different stages of this kind of house; orientation to the sun, maintaining constant temperature in the walls, overhangs, maintenance. It was amazing, and the house itself was gorgeous. The family took so much pride in their work and it really showed. We toured their house and then shuttled to another site to help lay parts of the foundation down. We had a radio, also a first for a build site, and worked on tamping dirt into the floors.
Here are two pictures of the straw bale house we toured.
These two are from the actual build site, the tamps and Rudy and Robby working hard on the flooring.
Our second day a bunch of us got to go rafting, and of course the sun that had been blazing chose that time to go behind the clouds. We had so much fun though, the rapids were class one and two, so we mostly just hopped out of the rafts and swam around while knocking each other out of the kayaks and splashing about. It was a perfect way to let loose and relax off the bikes.
3 comments:
what does "tamping" mean?
we used those pole like things to compress the dirt. They were made out of some thick branches and concrete that was poured into a bucket and let set. Some people loaded wheelbarrows full of dirt and made the dirt slightly damp, then they dumped it where we were working. Rudy and Robby flattened out the dirt by using this spreading tool thing and then we followed behind with those poles and smashed down the dirt so that it would be compacted enough. it was really fun!
it SOUNDS really fun!
Post a Comment