It was expected to rain all day on Thursday, and Phil and I had biked for five days straight, so we were due for a rest anyway. Boiling Springs was a great place to recuperate.

Phil woke up early and went to class with Danielle, while I slept in until he returned. After eating a bowl of cereal, I planned out a 5.5 mile run around Boiling Springs. I’m getting a little slow from not running regularly, and my legs were still tired from bicycling, but the run felt good and the weather had turned quite lovely for outdoor exercise.

After showering, Phil and I walked to cafeteria to meet Danielle for lunch. A university cafeteria is quite luxurious when you’ve been on the road for a while. When I worked at Brown, I was always opposed to the system of paying a fixed fee for as much food as you could eat, since I think it promotes overeating and wasting of food. People’s eyes tend to be bigger than their stomachs, and if they’re not paying any extra for more food, they will pile on as much as their plates will hold. Inevitably, people will eat more than they should and food will go to waste. However, I could really appreciate this cafeteria now. Danielle used her “points” to grant us access to the cafeteria, and we were released into a room full of any food you could imagine. I particularly enjoyed the limitless supply of ice-cream, both hard and soft-serve, and took advantage of this at breakfast the next day as well.

Danielle had to drive to Raleigh to pick up her sister, Gabrielle, who was visiting for the weekend, so she took off around 5pm. Taylor brought us to the on-campus Chick-fil-A for dinner, but afterwards, Phil and I walked around the town looking for more. We ended up buying ingredients at the supermarket to make pie and cookies. By the time Danielle arrived with her sister, we had made a pumpkin pie, blueberry pie, chocolate chip cookies, and a pumpkin-blueberry custard cake with the leftover ingredients.