Get Ready

Roger and friends on our recent ride

We are going to finish our trip.  We are going to leave Sunday to finish our trip. We are going to head across the desert for several days in the teeth of winter to finish our trip. So let's get ready!

I thought I would be teaching this spring, so we only had a short window to get the trip in after the fall semester ended and before spring term began.  That led me to check weather and temps for the desert and select this coming week for our trip. Maybe it's foolish, but we want to get on with it and we know that we cannot make the trip during the heat of summer, so here we go.

Riding with packs on our test drive

Roger got the racks mounted, and we've ridden with the packs on so that we could test everything. We went out the other day to make sure the new back end of the bike, the packs, the disk brake and the racks were all in tune. This happened to be on the 2nd anniversary of the day that we crashed for the second time, so I was conscious of what had happened before and a bit nervous about having something else occur that would hold us up yet again. Kevin Ingram, our friend and neighbor, went out with us to Riverside. It was not a long trip - about 32 miles - but it felt BIG in some sort of important way.  I've had this slightly anxious feeling while on the bike now for the past couple of rides.  I am desperate to avoid an accident, and of course, that's not a good way to ride.  It was comforting to have a friend along for the ride. 

Right after New Years, we went off with some friends on a long ride out towards the coast.  We intended to ride out to the train station in San Clemente, and then come home on the train. Partway there, we remembered that the bike car was unlikely to be on the train mid-week, and we might have trouble getting the tandem on the train.  So we decided to turn around and do an out-and-back instead of continuing to the coast. That's fine - it gave us a slightly longer ride and and a chance to test our legs for the longer distance. We are ready. We were tired, but we made it and felt like we could ride again the next day. That's the ultimate test for touring.

More than we planned, but that's ok.