Go!

It's go time! We headed out today to Kingman, AZ, ready to do this thing. We are riding out with Bob and Norma Clark, our friends from Redlands and the first who offered to bring us out here, over two years ago. We've had a great ride over, taking stretches of the Mother Road to see how they were (and frankly, because Bob and Norma were game and it's more fun than the Interstate!)

Bob and Norma offered to bring us out here two years ago, and the offer held.

It's pretty cold out here, and we're thinking that we'll be freezing come morning, but once we begin the climb over Sitgreaves Pass we should warm up. Funny how we did not notice that this first day was going to begin with a 14 mile descent! Brrr!

View from the pass

We are staying just a mile down the road from where we were hit. We drove past the spot on the way to dinner tonight. It feels weird, but like it's finally time to put that behind us. I asked Norma to follow us down the road when we head out, and get a photo when we begin tomorrow. I guess that might be a bit macabre, but I think it goes to my sense that we really do have to pick this up where we left off, and that means closing the circle here in Kingman. You gotta face it to overcome it.

Tomorrow, we should be back in California and maybe I will get that shot of the state flag that we missed when Jeff drove us home two years ago. Since we've only been away a day, it won't have quite the emotional resonance - but it will still represent our return home. And so the journey continues.

This Roy's in Barstow IS open, and a great stop for lunch

Get Set

Having made the decision that we're going to finish our ride, we are now in the throes of packing, working out our route details, and planning for that last long stretch across the Mojave. This has always been what we considered the "queen stage" of our planned route (i.e., the longest and most difficult). It's over 100 miles from Needles to Ludlow, and had we the luxury of 15 daylight hours, we might actually attempt to do it in one run. That was part of our initial idea when we were expecting to finish it over two years ago. We don't have that much daylight now. So we've got to plan to stop and stay somewhere in the middle.

Note the paucity of services listed there under the orange banner - basically, from the convenience store in Fenner to Amboy, we are on our own. 

And, we are expecting it to be pretty cold! Why are we going now? We're asking ourselves that question as we get ready for what could be bitter cold. The short answer is, we're ready. And it's overdue, well overdue. We picked this week based on weather forecasts that appeared to show clear weather. My plan several months ago was to be teaching again in the spring term, which meant we wouldn't be able to go until May if we didn't go now. We know what happened last year - it got too hot too fast and we couldn't go. We didn't want to go Christmas week, obviously! And we'd agreed to host our bridge club for New Year's so that was out. That left this week. And once you get your heart set on something, well, even at the age of 60, you don't want to postpone things forever and keep putting them off once you've gotten yourself worked up about something.

I am pulling together everything for our trip today. Because of the stretch on Old 66 across the Mojave, we are anticipating spending the night in Amboy. There's a convenience store there, an iconic one at the old cafe and motel called Roy's. The owner of that is the fella who owns El Pollo Loco. He can't operate the restaurant, but he does allow cyclists to camp there, and there's a bathroom, and you can buy bottled water in the convenience store provided you arrive before they close at 8 pm. So, for a trip of only one week, where we anticipate staying in hotels the rest of the time, we're going to have to take camping gear. Roger's concerned about being cold and I get it. This is likely to be one of the tougher nights of our trip! But I think we're going to survive it. With the two of us in sleeping bags in that little tiny tent, we should be fine.

This is our destination, where we are told we can put up our tent.  The inn and cafe are not operational, but there is a small store where we can buy water and snacks.

My primary concerns at this point are for our safety and warmth. (I guess technically warmth comes under the heading of safety anyway.) I've charged up all of our lights and we'll have our supplemental battery so that we can recharge them if we need to. I'll have my reflective vest on, and I'll be blinking from behind with my helmet light. All of this although technically the road is closed! We expect to have to go around some bridge repairs - another cyclist has told us we can get through - on what could be a very lonely stretch of road. 

Not a lot of gear, but a lot to take just for one night camping.

So we have this tiny pile of camping gear: the tent, sleeping pads, the sleeping bags and puff up pillows, and two small towels and some wash up soap. There is a restroom at Roy's. There's no potable water but the owner lets people stay as long as they are self-contained. We'll want to freshen up a bit, and so we're carrying this stuff. We've decided we will not carry cooking gear for the one night. Instead, we will purchase multiple sandwiches from the convenience store in Fenner before we begin the run to Roy's. We should be able to hold them fine while we travel, giving us lunch and dinner en route. In the morning we'll eat our protein bars and pray for coffee at Roy's before we set out for Ludlow! I don't think I've ever heard of anybody who died from a lack of their coffee in the morning, right!?

Here's a kind of fun fact. Our packs were damaged in the accident. You can see how they were torn and the little clasp there in the foreground was cracked when they were wrenched off the bike. Roger was looking into purchasing new packs, which ultimately we are going to need to do since I doubt that these are going to remain waterproof for long with all of the tears on them, but he also investigated just making them do for this week and that is how we learned that we could replace that little clasp for $0.19! So, with a couple dollars of shipping included, we were able to put these babies back on the road and that's what we're planning to do.


We put everything into the packs for our final shake-down cruise today.  We both felt pretty comfortable, and have concluded the Silver Queen v2.0 is ready to ride!

The Silver Queen, v2.0 is ready to roll. 

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.

Here we go again!

I am working through several years of medical expenses in order to clean up my files for our health care reimbursement account.  My health insurance plan is one that allows me to set aside money for medical expenses.  These are “pre-tax” dollars, which one is then allowed to withdraw for medical costs. As long as you pay for health care, you pay no tax on the money, ever.  So, this is a good deal for anyone who has the financial wherewithal to put a chunk of change away. (Of course, it’s just one more example of a public benefit program that benefits those who probably need it least – the working premise being that you have to have sufficient income to be able to set money aside for medical costs that you may not incur for years – or ever.  But that’s another post for another time!)

In any case, we’ve benefitted from this program, and I diligently save and eventually track all our medical expenses so that we can determine the amount to withdraw each year.  We don’t always take money out, and we certainly do not match our withdrawals to our expenses, line by line.  That would be an enormous data-tracking exercise.  We tend to do it when we need a couple thousand dollars.  Since our medical expenses have been high the past few years (accidents, surgeries for me, etc.) we have no trouble meeting my deductible.  That gives me an easy benchmark for the amount we can withdraw.  I don’t have to put all the documents into my spreadsheet to know that they have exceeded my deductible amount, and with our dental plan and Roger’s eyeglasses, it’s easy enough to confirm our costs are over $4,000 a year.  So if Roger asks what we can transfer from the account, it's easy to make a very good-faith estimate of a reasonable amount to take.

And what does that mean? It means that we’ve skated along like that for several years, and I am now in the process of “catching up” on many years of medical costs.  How many?  Well, the last tab in my spreadsheet was 2013!  Yikes.  Five years of medical data to input!  Ay yi yi.  I have at least taken the time in prior years to sort and order the expenses by date.  So I know roughly how much is there for 2014, 2015, and 2016. Ah, yes – 2016. That was the year of our big bicycle trip, and hence our VERY big medical file following the accident that ended it. So that year is in good shape, and since we were reimbursed by the insurance company of the guy who hit us, we won’t be able to claim any of those costs in this program, anyway.

But then there was that OTHER accident – the one that happened on December 29, 2016. That one was on us, so to speak. And so here I am, contentedly if somewhat belatedly keying in my expenses for things like prescriptions and office visits for my trigger finger surgery and other fine stuff like that in 2017 when I come across the bill for my little stay at Loma Linda University Medical Center. Sigh. It just never goes away. The specter of those events keeps coming up. When you least expect it, here it is again.  Powee! – like hitting the pavement all over again.

For me, at least – this was a “2-fer” – meaning that I was basically in the “buy one, get one free” mode by that time in the medical expenses year. The first accident, the one in Kingman, took me over my deductible. So this one was pretty much fully paid by Kaiser. I had a $100 co-pay for my ER visit, and I think that’s it.  Not bad! If there’s any silver lining to be found in all of this, I guess that is it. And when you are looking at piles of bills that total thousands of dollars, a silver lining is a nice thing to find.

This time last year . . .

Thanks to Facebook, I got a little reminder a day or so ago about where we were last year at this time. We had gone up the highway for a few days to hike and enjoy "fall" in the Sierra.  Coincidentally, it was also when I was getting checked out for my heart condition.  I wasn't quite sure I could remember when that happened, but with Facebook's nudging and a look at my phone's calendar, I was able to recreate our trip - and another portion of our journey together.

Good thing it was not summer! This is easy to hide under a sweater.

November 5th was the day - photos of that glorious hike up the mountain came back to remind me how beautiful it was.  And then there's that photo that I would not have posted on Facebook - the one with the wires from the Holter monitor zigging and zagging across my chest . . . 

Since I had been having this odd sensation when I used the bike trainer on the patio, and my deductible had been met (I hate to say it, but financial considerations do play a role in the appointments I schedule with the doctor), I had gone in to see a cardiologist and step one of that process is to wear a monitor for 24 hours. Since I had been in for a stress test years ago and nothing was found, I was determined that I would have an episode this time.  I got home, got on the trainer and rode hard until the odd sensation occurred.  Breathless, a little dizzy, heart thumping and racing - there it was!  Bingo!  Surely there would be something to review this time!

Some of the most beautiful trails in the world are in the Sierra. Roger and I love it here.

Trees here are survivors

We had planned this trip before I made the doctor appointment, and I didn't want to miss it, so I arranged to wear the monitor over the night and keep it through the weekend.  During our hike the next morning (at 10,000 feet) I jogged along the trail until I felt woozy, hoping to get another episode recorded.  Yes indeed.  There's that odd, breathless feeling again.  Wouldn't anyone feel breathless, hiking at 10,000 feet?  Probably.  But the racing in my chest was not normal, and I hoped the monitor picked it up.

It was a relief when my 24 hours was up, and I was able to peel the sticky little doo-dads off my chest.  Another day in the Sierra without being trussed up like a turkey, and then we were home.

I can't quite make out from the calendar exactly when all the follow-up appointments were, but it's clear enough that I had to go see the cardiologist in Redlands again for the results from the monitor (yes, you have Afib) and then I was scheduled to see the electrocardiologist (specialist from LA who comes as far as Fontana every now and then).  This is the guy who would perform an oblation, if that turned out to be the best course of treatment.  He is the "heart rhythm" guy, and was very helpful to our understanding of what was going on.

We discussed my options and general health, and ultimately agreed that we'd just take a "wait and see" approach since I had, by this time, also been diagnosed with sleep apnea and that condition can have an affect on the heart, leading to a high correlation with Afib.  Since I was just beginning to use the breathing machine for that, I made the case that maybe this treatment would address the Afib, and I would not need medicine or treatment at all.  Plus, I was scheduled for surgery to correct my right carpal tunnel issues.  I wasn't going to be doing anything very athletic for weeks anyway, as I recovered from that surgery.  The doctor prescribed a very low dose beta blocker for me, and said to call him if I had symptoms, and then we would fill the script and begin medication.  Otherwise, nothing. 

Thus it was I headed into the Thanksgiving holiday with thanks that I wasn't facing an imminent oblation. Even as I awaited my next surgical procedure the following week!

The heart-shaped rock seemed especially appropriate on this hike!

Two years. TWO YEARS.

Two years.

I cannot believe it has been an entire year since I last posted. Except - I can believe it. I can believe it because when you are not on an excellent adventure, life takes over. And life, it turns out, is actually a lot harder than something remarkable like riding your bicycle around the country.

That's easy. It's a long vacation doing what you want to do. Life, on the other hand, is all the little things that get in the way of what you'd like to do. So even though I have often thought about our story, and about updating this blog so that it would be complete, I have found it exceedingly difficult to get something posted. There are a lot of reasons for that, and maybe I'll get to them later. In the meantime, here's where we are now.

I could not sleep last night. I woke up about 1, and I was restless and awake until sometime after 4. I finally recognized what was going on. When I realized that the next day was Halloween, I was able to place the day, and my insomnia, in context. If you've ever had a momentous event occur in your life, perhaps you know what I mean when I say, "your body will remember even if you forget." So my body remembered that October 30th is the day we were hit. My body needed me to acknowledge that date. My mind might not have recognized it in conscious thought, but subconsciously it was screaming at me that I had to acknowledge this day.

I lay awake, composing this post in my mind and wishing that was enough to let me fall asleep again. Of course, it doesn't usually work that way! So when the alarm went off a few minutes after 7, I was tired. I've been tired all day. What I did not want to do was lie awake another night, thinking about what I ought to have written. There are many days in the last year and even before that that I have crafted a draft for this blog. But I can't seem to get around to posting it. There's always something else that I need to do. That's that real life thing coming into play. So I'm well behind in my story.

That makes me anxious, of course. Because I am hopeful that I will be able to catch up on my story before we actually finish our trip. And there's the answer to that question. No, we have not yet finished our trip. Not in two years' time. We spent six full months on the road and yet we cannot seem to find one more week to finish the trip.

I've written but not posted several additional entries about what's occurred in the last year. I'm going to do my best to complete those, add the photos that I've been cataloging, and get them posted - but if that doesn't happen at least let me say this much: the pain following the removal of my cast which I last wrote about in my post a year ago persisted and grew more intense. Inside of several weeks I was almost unable to use my right hand. I had to schedule surgery to correct the carpal tunnel injury which I probably sustained many years ago and exacerbated with the break.

Since I had met my deductible for the year, I took the opportunity to check out a couple of other things that had been bothering me. Roger had been saying for some time that he thought I ought to have my sleep checked out, because he felt it was likely that I suffered from sleep apnea. And so I did! As a result, I was diagnosed with sleep apnea.

There were also the occasional issues I had with a very rapid heart rate during exercise. As I was recovering from my wrist fracture, I used the bicycle on the trainer to stay in shape. While we managed to go nearly 10,000 miles with no episodes on our trip, my work on the trainer was causing me to have frequent episodes where my heart rate would spike, I would get a bit dizzy, and would have to stop until the heart rate returned to a more normal rhythm.  After wearing a monitor for 24 hours to capture these episodes, the exercise-induced tachycardia I had managed for 10 years was recast as atrial fibrillation. There was a week somewhere around Thanksgiving, I forget the exact time now, that I received news about all three of these issues in very rapid succession. It was, without a doubt, one of the more sobering and discouraging periods of my life. I felt like everything was falling apart.

Anyway, the upshot of all this is that a week after Thanksgiving, I had another surgery - this time to correct carpal tunnel issues on my right wrist.

I wasn't overly concerned about the A-fib. In consultation with my cardiologist, we decided to keep an eye on it and assess whether or not the treatment for sleep apnea would mitigate the A-fib (they are highly correlated). But I had an episode in February where we did a very gentle ride and I just kept having episodes of lightheadedness, dizziness, and very rapid, fluttery heart beats. It didn't stop when I got home, so I thought it made sense to get it checked out. That escalated things a bit, and I now take a very low dose of a beta blocker to keep my heart rate from spiking during exertion.

I began a new chapter in the spring, teaching several sections of a course at our University here. It's exciting to me - a challenge and gratifying to have some income. But this new activity disrupted our normal training rides. It became more difficult for Roger and me to get on the tandem.

Still, we made plans to complete our trip once the term was over. Or, as soon as possible after the term was over, considering the fact that we had again agreed to host a bicycle team for the Redlands Classic, and we couldn't leave while all that was going on! And then we decided to go up to Lake Tahoe and watch the team finish one of the races in the Amgen Tour of California. So that pushed things out another week or two. But we really were going to go to Kingman and finish the trip in May. We had even arranged transportation with some of my friends. Except - the weather forecast was for temperatures of 110 degrees in Amboy.

And . . . Roger had some conversations with a friend of ours who teaches at the pharmacy school in Loma Linda, and she did not think it would be wise for me to subject myself to those temperatures while taking a beta blocker. Because, you know - desert - and more importantly, deserted roads . . .

What are you going to do? Once again, my health interrupted our plan. As we had discussed the possibility of completing the trip in May, I was prepared to ride in the heat. I was willing to make a run for it across that long stretch, taking minimal supplies to reduce our weight and increase our speed. I was prepared to ride at night with lights so it would be cooler, resting in the middle of the day at Roy's in Amboy. I had anticipated that we might drop off water bottles along the route on our way to Kingman so we could replenish our supplies. But I was not willing to place Roger in the position of having me potentially collapse because of this issue with my heart and my medication. So when he came home with this news from Vickie, we gave it up. We would not try to do the trip until it got cooler.

And that more or less brings us to now. We've discussed whether or not we could go at Thanksgiving, but I'm teaching this term also and I really don't want to be that constrained when we complete our trip. So it looks like it will be in the Christmas break. I don't think we'll have any problem being too cold, although it will be a different set of issues to address than the heat.

Stay tuned!

A year ago today, part 2

The last few weeks have been difficult ones for me. On this day last year, our trip around the country ended prematurely when we were rear-ended in Kingman, Arizona. I cannot tell you how many times I have uttered that sentence. Even just the other day, meeting a couple people at a Conservancy outing, one of the women said, "oh, you're the one that went around the country on your bike, right?" She noted that she and her husband had followed our journey. She was telling her friend how we didn't finish the tour because of the accident. Yes, that's right. "Are you going to go back and finish it?"  Yes, that's right.  And once again I shared the story of how we were hit in Kingman. How we later had an accident after returning home. How I decided to take the opportunity while recovering from the pelvis fracture to have my trigger finger surgery done.  How we were pretty much all healed up from that and back to riding again when I fell and broke my wrist.  And now, how my wrist injury is healing up well but my carpal tunnel nerves are causing quite a lot of trouble and so I am probably looking at another surgery before the end of the year.

Or maybe I didn't tell the whole story. I am getting pretty tired of it. I imagine that other folks must be, as well. 

Clearly there is something wrong here!

I didn't expect it to take this long. Roger and I had talked about going back out to Kingman to complete the trip home as soon as we arrived home last year.  We even had the borrowed tandem that we could have ridden to complete the trip - but it was getting on winter and we weren't really fully back to snuff until mid-December, and by then it was pretty cold in the desert, plus the holidays were coming  . . .  so we figured we'd go in the spring. Until we crashed right before New Years.  Then, it seemed as though we would probably not make it until late spring, due to my injury and subsequent surgery.

And then we decided that we would not want to go until we had the Silver Queen back, and that was early May. By then, there were road repairs on old Route 66.  We didn't ever get as far as checking alternate routes, because it was really starting to get hot.  Maybe we'd wait until fall, when the weather let up a bit. Doing a run through the desert without support requires a lot of water and you don't want to tempt fate by attempting it in the dead of summer.

Well, July 22 I fell, breaking my wrist, and so all our plans for the fall went on hold.  Even the Mammoth Fall Century, which we've done many times, was in question.  My cast was removed the day before the ride.  So - no century for me!  We went anyway, since we were registered for it, and our friend Vickie rode the tandem with Roger. And I began to think that maybe we'd go out to the desert on the anniversary of our accident, and finish the trip up "on time" but a year late.

Whoopsy!

Except that's not working out, either.  I spent some time on the trainer while in my cast, and I have been out on the tandem with Roger several times in the past few weeks.  But the numbness in my right hand has got me feeling pretty tentative, and it's not really all that comfortable riding with the wrist brace on. I can ride without it, but I'm still anxious about bumps and jolts so I feel more secure with it on. So far we've only been about 35 miles. We're not ready (I'm not ready!) to go 300 miles yet.

First cast - fashion pink

Second cast, a more manageable size and color

And so, though I put "Kingman" on my calendar for today many months ago, we are not in Kingman.  We are not getting ready to head for home, at long last. We're just in Redlands, reflecting on the year past.  We've started to think lately that maybe we will try to complete the trip Thanksgiving week.  That's the latest ending to my ever-evolving story about our Excellent Adventure!

Your reporter, with wrist brace

We took a short ride today.  We just went up the hill to Sunset and then around over to Live Oak Canyon and home.  Less than 20 miles, but it was important to get on the bike and do something today, of all days. I feel pretty good on the bike, although of course I am not very strong right now. Still, it's something - and you have to start with something!