OK – I swear a bunch of pervos got together when they were naming some towns here in PA and thought; “yeah, Virginville is a GREAT name for a town!”

and “oh, how about Blue Ball?!”

“OH!!  INTERCOURSE!!  One town HAS to be named that!”

“YAASSSSS!!  That will keep people snickering for hundreds of years!”

I’m pretty sure that is how the conversation went….

YES, we have all these towns in Pennsylvania – and yes we still snicker about them.  ANYWAY, I have been obsessed with doing a Cranksgiving from the minute I heard about them.  I missed the one in my area, but saw there was one at a bike shop in Intercourse, PA called Intercourse Bike Works.

In case you don’t know, Cranksgiving is an organized bike ride to various grocery stores where you purchase donations from a list for a local food bank.  Every Cranksgiving has different rules – some are races to see how many stores you can get to, some have competitions where you can win prizes for the heaviest item brought back, etc…

I was interested in this Cranksgiving because it was set up as a group bike ride with 2 options: a 9 mile ride with a stop at one grocery store or a 34 mile ride with a stop at 3 grocery stores.  This was not a race or a competition of any kind – we showed up at the bike shop and picked the cue sheet with the route you want to do.  There were all levels of cyclists there – which I felt made this ride a huge success – this bike shop was the top in the nation last year for donating food according to the email we got from them!

I talked my friend Lenore into going with me and we arrived bright and early Saturday morning, grabbed the cue sheet for the 9 mile ride and tried to stay warm until the ride started.

The 34 mile riders started off first, with the rest of us following 10 minutes after.  We started down the road, enjoyed the Lancaster County country views – and tried to avoid the many road apples (AKA horse poop) along the route – this is the Amish country in case you didn’t know and we saw plenty of horse and buggies.

We got to the grocery store, but a lot of things on the list were already sold out.  There were a few non cyclists there that were complaining about the amount of people walking around the store (there were 180 cyclists that signed up for the ride).  Lenore and I found a few cans of soup and cranberry sauce and snagged them.  After we paid, the grocery store put the donations into boxes which the bike shop picked up later in the day – this was great because then we didn’t have to carry everything back like a lot of other cranksgivings I have read about.

We continued back to the bike shop – passing many friendly farm animals along the route.  This was a great day, a well organized route and of course for a great cause.  The only thing I would say was that there were blue arrows on the road for us to follow, but I didn’t see them until mile 6 – they sort of blended in, but we had the cue sheet so we were fine.

Here’s the video I put together of the ride!

Anyone else ever get to ride in a Cranksgiving event?  🙂