With a morning full of silence and sleeping in, the team slowly awoke and got ready for the day. On our usual rest days everyone is free to go wherever they want without a schedule for the day. Unlike the usual rest day, today was a day full of bonding and having fun with our teammates. After everyone got breakfast, a smorgasbord of leftover breakfast from the day prior, we all began to get our stuff ready for the adventures that awaited us on this very special rest day.
What is special about today is that we all will go out to explore Lincoln with our “dates.” Today is our very own I4k valentines day. Although we aren’t celebrating on February 14th, everyone on the team got randomly paired up with a partner they had to go on a “date” with. These partners were chosen randomly and gave everyone a chance to get to know each other better and converse 1 on 1 with someone they might not always get the chance to. We knew who our partners were a couple days in advance, so everyone had looked ahead to make plans for what to do in Lincoln. Some of these plans were foiled due to inclement weather and had to be changed on the fly. The team all loaded into the van to get dropped off to different places around the city. Here is what our “dates” were doing today: Parker and Ren went to lunch at Runza and then to the Museum of American Speed, Cole and Ved went to a fancy italian restaurant for lunch, and then also went to the Museum of American Speed, Anthony, Max, and Ehsan also went to the Museum of American Speed, Aadit and Maaike went to play dinosaur themed indoor mini-golf, Sam and Nishk went to an indoor gun range, and Lauren and Tada went on a cave tour and the botanical gardens. As you can probably tell most of our groups ended up at the Museum of American Speed. This was completely unplanned, but a funny coincidence as we all saw each other there. Some of the groups had planned to go kayaking or other activities, but decided to go to the museum instead because of the rain.
After all of our dates, all the groups who went to the Museum of American Speed, and the group from the indoor gun range decided to walk over to a nearby bowling alley. After looking at the prices of bowling and also seeing that the bowling alley had laser tag, we decided to go a different route. We decided to play 2 rounds of laser tag, the first being free-for-all and the second being teams. This ended up being one of the highlights of the day as the team took this game of laser tag very competitively. In round one Anthony took a dominating victory by a wide margin. In round 2 we decided to do teams, but we had a few other random people joining us. We decided to split the groups into: a team of 4 of us, a team of 5 of us, and the family of 6 who decided to play laser tag with us. This second round somehow was even more tense than the first. After everyone had realized how seriously we were taking the game, it was as if the teams turned into navy seals. The teams moved as a group and came up with elaborate strategies of how to win. When the lights turned off and our laser guns stopped shooting we knew it would be a close race for first. The scores were released and the group of Max, Anthony, Nishk, and Ved had won with only a margin of 1,000 points over our second I4k team. Funnily enough, both I4k teams had gotten over 10k points more than the family of 6 and everyone had an amazing time.
After this the team was a little worn out from the headed laser tag games, so we all went back to the stayover to relax for a while. Before this however, we made a detour for a quick stop at a Trek store in Lincoln. This is where we had our best bike shop encounter yet. The mechanic there recognized our group from last year and was very excited to work on our bikes totally for free! He was even able to give one of our riders new pedals. He was amazing, and we left the bike shop wishing that he could come along on our journey as our mechanic. (Sorry to the two team mechanics, but this guy was amazing) When we got back to the stayover, everyone had miscellaneous things to do, some cleaning their bike, getting dinner, and messing around having fun in the gym. While we don’t have room to pack a whole lot of “for fun” items in our bag, a couple of us had packed tennis balls. In the evening a few of us had decided to make up our own games that only needed a tennis ball, a basketball hoop, and a wall. What we spent most of our time doing was trying to throw a tennis ball in the basketball hoop from full-court. On I4k we have learned more how to entertain ourselves and have fun without phones or other distractions. It feels like being a kid again, as we could be entertained for hours with as little as a tennis ball. As the team began winding down in preparation for the days of biking ahead a few of us made a late-night dominoes run before bed. As it turns out pizza is actually quite decent fuel for the night before a long bike ride.
