you can get yourself clean...

Last night, and tonight (today is our first real day off), we are staying at the Christian County YMCA in Taylorville, Illinois. So, naturally, I have had the song YMCA in my head for the last 15 hours. We rolled into the Y last night around 7:00 after almost 100 miles of cornfields, soy beans and, well, corn fields and soybeans. Southern Illinois isn't much for scenery. However, this is one of the nicest host locations we have had as there is an enormous swimming pool with a water slide about 15 feet away from the work out room we are sleeping in. Thanks to all the time spent at the rec center this last spring, I feel right at home.

It is surprising how quickly I have gotten used to sleeping in a different place every night. Perhaps it is because, for the most part, our host locations have been taken care of by our leaders (usually ahead of time). We have stayed in all kinds of churches, a few YMCAs and even some campsites. What isn't quite so well organized is the taking of showers. Upon arrival in Middletown, NY, a smelly heap of us piled into the van to drive to the local Y to take showers only to discover that they close at 5:00, a good hour before I finished cycling. The leaders looked at each other, and then looked at us and said, (if I remember correctly) in unison, "well, no showers tonight." I have never really been over zealous in regards to personal hygiene, but something about the hot sun, 75 miles on a bicycle and chain grease coating both my hands and right leg demanded that we find a place to bathe. Carys had the same look in her eyes and after we returned to the church, we suggested to a few of our van-mates that we find showers on our own. Armed only with determination and our matching jerseys (which we thought added some legitimacy) we headed up Main Street prepared to knock on doors. Before we got too far we saw another church with several people outside and decided to take a shot. A few non-English phone calls later we were offered the showers at the Portuguese Cultural Center of Middletown, NY. At this point, the poor woman thought she was helping out the 8 of us. Little did she know we had 26 other sweaty friends waiting back at camp... Needless to say, we got a few interesting looks as our enormous van, following this kind woman's van, pulled into the Cultural Center's parking lot 15 minutes away, and 16 tired bodies were escorted into the locker room of the fairly lavish country club-esque center. Sometimes, I don't think know what they are getting themselves into when they offer to help us out.

In Knobbsville, PA, I arrived pretty late to the church. As I was pulling in, there was a man waiting in the parking lot. This was a very small town, I think the church was the only non-residential building there. Before I had a chance to wonder where we were going for showers, we were sitting in his living room, waiting one after another to use his own shower. This happened again in western, PA when the pastor offered us his "Man's Shower." I couldn't have imagined what it was going to be like until I actually got down there, but he wasn't kidding when he said "it isn't much to look at but it gets the job done." Imagine a dank basement hallway with a bathroom at the end of it. One light bulb with a string cast an eerie glow on the cinder block shower with no door or curtain. The cement floor, covered with some type of red metallic residue was complimented by the bricks sticking out of the walls to hold what I believe to be the remnants of an aging bar of soap.

There was even one town where we bought a hotel room to shower one after another in the tiny bathroom. It was a lot like little league softball where one person was in the shower, one person was "on deck" in the bathroom, naked, and a third was "in the hole" right outside the bathroom door. Even though 20 or so of us showered in there, I think the water was actually only running for about half an hour.