Mayo and I welcomed ourselves into our new home in Asheville, NC this past week! What fun. We decided to avoid competing with the crazy folk who travel on the Sunday following Thanksgiving, and instead departed early Monday morning. We worked off a good portion of Thanksgiving’s delicious gluttony by packing our Penske 12′ trailer to the gills. This picture does not do it full justice, but rest assured that we utilized at least 98% of the storage space available on this yellow badboy. Floor to ceiling, front to back, this truck is FULL.(FYI, Penske was great. U-Haul is the typical go to for peoples’ traveling needs, but after about a minute of online research you’ll realize U-Haul sucks.)

Our last night in New England gave us an idea of what we are escaping by making this journey… namely cold weather and snow. Yes a mere dusting, but snow nonetheless. In fact, as I write this one week after departing, I was told by my friends on NPR this morning that New England is being blanketed with snow today. The salt-of-the-earth part of me longingly misses a good dumping of snow in my native New England; but the cyclist part of me reminds me that at a time like this, change is good. Here’s a parting shot of Mayo and me taking last minute pictures with Mayo’s coworker/friend/roommate Tyne.The drive was enjoyable… or I should say, as enjoyable as a 20ish hour drive alone can be. See, in order to have a car upon arrival, Mayo drove her Hybrid Civic (which you all remember gets a sweet 40+ mpg) alongside the Penske. With an iPod full of Podcasts, I was set for the entire drive. One night and roughly 1000 miles later - with much thanks to the Ashtons for a superb night of hospitality in Virginia - we made it safe and sound to Asheville.

I can thank an untimely crash to being able to opt out of heavy lifting and moving in. My broken arm, albeit mostly healed, gave me a verbal doctor’s note that I shouldn’t be lifting large or unsteady objects. Nice! As a result, Mayo’s brother came up from Greenville the day after our arrival to help move everything in, with me providing uplifting moral support and directions for a solid dose of feng shui in our apartment. It’ll be fun having him a mere hour away… especially when the temps drop here at altitude in Asheville and I can join the Greenville winter bike league. 80 people on a winter group ride?! Unreal.

When not getting acquainted with the town, our neighbors, and the local riding scene, Mayo and I are continuing a short lived tradition of playing Scrabble. There have been lots of good games and solid plays lately; here is one of the finer and more apt plays Mayo had in a recent match. The word: SPANDEX. In fact, she opened with this word and in doing so used all seven letters for a 50 point bonus! For you non-Scrabble players out there, that is a solid move. And for you nay-sayers out there who claim that SPANDEX is a proper noun and therefore not applicable, the Scrabble online dictionary says that SPANDEX is a synthetic elastic fiber. Moreover, there is the plural SPANDEXES.

It’s worth pointing out, though, that I’m undefeated in North Carolina. Two and oh, baby! Thereby bringing my record up to 5-1, including games played back home in NH.