A recap of the plan

For those of you new to the blog, I will give a brief synopsis of our plans. In May, we will fly out to Portland and then be transported to the Pacific shore in Astoria. In the next few months we will follow a route basically along or parallel to Route 12 for a long stretch of the way, which means Montana. It seems that we will be in Montana forever. In fact, we may meet the residency requirements to become Montanans.
As our route takes us through familiar territory with familiar faces like in Toledo, we hope to have some joiners who wish to pedal with us for a few miles or a few days. Several areas along the route are perfect for this. The Toledo to Buffalo or Buffalo to Albany stretches are ideal because it is easy to put a bike on the train and head back to either Toledo or Buffalo. Beyond Albany, we haven’t even figured out a route. The rest of our route is fairly well set.

We plan on camping when necessary, but at this point think that we will be spending most of our time in hotels or with members of the Warm Showers List. In fact, our kind transporter in Portland is a WSL member as are we. We have also been lucky to find another WSLer on Puget Island.

Because it is supposedly winter and we are rehabbing a house, we don’t expect to start training until April. A month of riding should give our legs some muscle mass. We have the advantage now of living in a hilly area of the country, so we don’t have to drive somewhere like we did when we lived in Toledo to find some hills. Highway overpasses no longer qualify as hills.

The first sections of our route are hilly or windy or maybe both. We aren’t on a rigid schedule so can stop anytime the going gets tough because we tough people don’t need to go when we aren’t interested. This will be a drastic change from tours with large groups when we had to reach a certain destination everyday. With just the two of us, it’s a lot easier to stop on a whim.

We aren’t planning on cooking any food. We are both happy to eat cold food when we can’t get a hot meal. We’ve been known to eat PB&J for dinner. No, not at home, but when desolate lands presented no other eating opportunities besides dead iguanas or other pungent roadkill.

Already we are thinking about an Alaska to Tierra del Fuego trip and we haven’t even started this one.