Big Ted wins the SAG Award.
Best driver. Best little car. Strong work on the peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. General willingness to support several people who are voluntarily riding bicycles across the country.
Gone but not forgotten.
That was the Day 16 appreciation post. Ted's stretch with us was ending, and he deserved the whole update.
SAG means support and gear. In practice, it means the person in the car does every job the people on the bikes cannot do while they are riding. Move the bags. Find water. Make food. Meet us down the road. Figure out where we actually are. Listen to whatever is suddenly wrong with a bike, a route, a stomach, or a rider's mood.
The MINI is not a large vehicle. We put a very large job inside it.
By this point the car had carried bikes, bags, spare parts, food, drinks, wet clothes, tired people, and the accumulated nonsense of more than two weeks on the road. Ted kept driving it forward and kept us fed.
The sandwiches matter more than they sound like they should. Riding all day turns food into logistics. You do not need a beautiful lunch. You need something that can be made quickly, carried easily, eaten beside a road, and repeated tomorrow without anybody holding a meeting about it.
PB&J is very hard to disrupt.
The days before Ted's post took us across the top of Texas and into Oklahoma.
Day 13 was Texas sun, farms, and grasshoppers everywhere. The roads were flat enough to make distance look easy, which is not the same as making it easy. Wind can turn a straight road into a long personal argument.
Day 14 got us to Woodward. Texas was done. Oklahoma was now an “OK state,” and we still had roughly 1,700 miles left. That number was smaller than where we started and still larger than almost any ride I had ever considered normal.
Day 15 reached Stillwater. The entire post was “OK.” Sometimes the caption budget is one word.
The short posts hide the daily work. We were riding, eating, cleaning up, checking equipment, moving the car, finding the next place, and getting ready to do it again. A support person takes a huge part of that load. The riders get the photos. The person driving the car makes a lot of the photos possible.
That is why Ted got the award.
I like building things with small teams because the jobs get wonderfully unclear. People do what needs doing. A title matters less than whether somebody notices the cooler is empty or the route has changed. This trip is working the same way.
Ted did not just drive. He helped make the whole daily system work. The PB&J production alone deserves formal recognition.
We were almost out of Oklahoma when we posted the thank-you. Arkansas was next. The bikes still had a long way to go, and the little car had more work ahead too.
Big Ted, best SAG driver ever.
The award is real. The trophy is probably a sandwich.