July 28, 2016 – Sun, 95 degrees
Miles Today: 35
Miles to Date: 13,682
States to Date: 36
Can a person get too much sleep? Despite yesterday being a light day, I slept ten hours, and then felt draggy all day. I stopped at the NASA Goddard Visitor Center; the only adult not accompanied by an eight-year-old boy. The kids loved all the models of various rocket and space capsules. I was enchanted by the incredible images of our galaxy that line the walls.
My favorite exhibit was the Solarium, a black space where they run actual footage of NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. Each wavelength is assigned a unique color. It takes a team of videographers about ten hours to create one minute of these high-resolution images.
Back on earth, I had a pair of meetings with folks from Greenbelt, MD, a New Deal era new town that has proven to be a fascinating social experiment. Then I pedaled toward Mount Rainier. The saturating heat continues day after day. As long as I’m moving, all is good. But if I stop, even for a traffic light, the heat penetrates me and the sweat pours through the question mark on my back. The swelter created ominous clouds, so I took a late afternoon McDonald’s break to sit out some thunderstorms. Then continued on along beautiful bike paths that sparkled in the dusk to reach my evening host.
The Awkward Pose 