Day -2: A different type of training
Sleeping is not the easiest thing to do on the train. While the seats do recline a certain amount, finding a comfortable position can be quite challenging. Compound that with the occasional jarring motion, trains whizzing by in the opposite direction and the occasional old man walking around waking people up at 2am looking for his black address book, you don't get much sleep.While the sleep was somewhat expected, breakfast was surprisingly good. Somewhere around 7:30am a group of us wandered into the Dining Car looking for something to eat and most of us had the scrambled eggs meal. The eggs, while not great, weren't too bad, they may have even been made from real eggs. ALong with that we received hash browns and a croissant. After breakfast, we lounged around in the Cafe car since we didn't particularly want to go back to our seats. We didn't really do anything in particular while we were back there, just sitting around, avoiding being in our seats. While we were sitting around, we stopped in Buffalo and picked up another rider. He was kind enough to bring us some donuts and bagels.About noon, we hit our first major roadblock to the success of our trip. Our original stayover in New York had backed out on us Monday, and we thought that we had another place secured, however they had just called to say that they wouldn't be able to house us. So there was a bit of a scramble to start calling people we knew in order to find a place to house 23 cyclists. Zernyu, whose parents live in New York, were willing to house some of us, however we still needed housing for about half the team. Eventually Tim came through with his cousin who happened to live on the north end of Manhattan. It wasn't an ideal location, considering that Zernyu's apartment was closer to lower Manhattan, but overall some place is better than none.Not much happened for the rest of our trip into New York. There was a bit of a wait in Albany as part of the train was detached to go to Boston and some passengers boarded for New York.A few hours later we arrived in New York, surprisingly on time, which for Amtrak is somewhat of a rarity. While we were waiting for our bikes to come out of the luggage, we carried our gear out to the van. There was a light mist coming down as we stepped out of the station, nothing heavy enough to really cause any problems, but enough that was noticed it. After we loaded our bags into the van, we headed back into the station to setup our bikes. I had a bit more to reassemble than most, but I got everything together in the right place with a little help. Unfortunately I forgot my skewer key (something that locks my axels in place) so I could only hand tighten them, so they were bouncing around a bit and sometimes were falling out of the dropouts as we walked our bikes the 25 or so blocks to Zernyu's apartment. At Zernyu's we had a quick team meeting before we reorganized ourselves into our different stayover destinations. It would be another hour on the subway before we would hit our stayover location on the north side of Manhattan. Upon arriving we carried our bikes up six flights of stairs to the apartment we were staying at and begun to setup for the evening. Our hosts were pretty nice and had offered to abandon their apartment for the couple evenings that we would be around in order to give us more room. After getting settled in, it was nearly 11:30, however we had still not eaten dinner, so we set out to find something to eat. Being nearly midnight, many places were already closed, however we found a couple of pizza places which were still open. We filled up on pizza and walked back and fell asleep.