Permission Slips

Monday, February 6th, 2012 Posted by Jessica. Published under Bike Tour Preparations, Mini-Adventure, Personal Stories. No Comments.

I know this sounds obvious, but dropping your current life and embarking on an extended bike tour is no easy task.  People continuously marvel at Rachel and I with our adventures ahead and behind us, remarking “I wish I could do something like that!”  SO many people want to bike tour.  Why aren’t more people doing it?  The excuses are countless: I have a full-time job (so did we!  You can take it as an opportunity to change career tracks, or take an extended leave of absence, or take the risk that you’ll be applying for jobs once you’re finished; but chances are you won’t regret having an adventure once it’s all said and done); I have a mortgage to pay (rent it out– it’s a great way to generate income while traveling!); I have kids (take them with you! What better way for them to learn about the world?  Many families bike tour together!); I can’t afford a $2,000 touring bike (we’ve seen people touring and having an amazing time on mountain bikes, $50 beach cruisers, and Razor scooters– any bike will suffice, I promise!).

And this doesn’t just apply to bike touring.

Getting up the nerve to achieve our goals and live out our dreams is extremely difficult.  I know this first hand, because if it weren’t for Rachel I would still be sitting at my desk job in Boston thinking, “Someday, I’m going to ride my bike across the country!”  I knew I wanted to have an adventure like this, and I knew that life was about much more than working 40-45 hours a week.  But I think deep down, I was waiting for someone to come along and give me permission to take the leap.  I think deep down we’re ALL waiting around for someone to come along and hand us permission slips to live out our dreams.  I was so incredibly lucky to have Rachel come into my life and demand, “What the hell are you waiting for?  Let’s make this bike trip happen!”  Rachel’s the type of person who recognizes that if we want to change our situations, no one’s going to come along and do it for us.  So why waste time being unhappy or unsatisfied?

Not everyone has a supportive person to co-pilot through your adventure planning like I did, so I’m going to try to reach through the Internet tubes and give you a hand: I know this is all easy to say, but it’s not so easy to act on.  That’s where learning to act a bit more impulsively comes in handy.  I know, I know.  You got to where you are today by being very calculated in your decision-making process.  You went to school and followed all the rules, and then snagged yourself a big kid job.  I did that, too!  But sometimes you just have to close your eyes and jump.  Otherwise you might end up 5, 10, 15, 20 years later still saying, “Someday I’m going to do __________!”

And one of the wonderful side effects of taking the leap and achieving your goal is that more aspirations crop up.  Only this time, they seem much more manageable and not out of reach.  After all, you’ve already risked everything and the outcome was amazing.  You knew it would be– it was just that giving yourself permission to take the plunge was scary.  Do you honestly think you’ll go to your deathbed saying, “Gosh, I wish I hadn’t bike toured for a year when I was in my 20s!”, or “What a waste of time backpacking through India was!”, or “I wish I’d experienced less of the world”?

Tearin’ Through the Deep South!

Monday, January 9th, 2012 Posted by Jessica. Published under Riding. No Comments.

Since spending Christmas in Gulf Shores, Alabama with Rachel’s family, we’ve now biked across Mississippi and are currently staying with Rachel’s cousins in Gonzales, Louisiana (which is about halfway between Baton Rouge and New Orleans).  It took us seven days to get here, in which we ran the whole gamut of paying for a camp site, stealth camping, and paying for several motels because of an intense cold streak that billowed across the country.  Normally I hate shelling out money for a motel, but I refuse to camp in temperatures below freezing.  Sure, our Big Agnes Lulu sleeping bags are guaranteed to keep us alive down to 15 degree weather, but I’d rather not shiver the whole night if I don’t have to.

Rachel’s parents gave me the Adventure Cycling Association’s awesome Southern Tier map set for Christmas, so Rachel and I are following that route to California from here on out.  Our first day leaving Gulf Shores on December 29 took us on a ferry across Mobile Bay, where we got to see tons of oil rigs.  Call me stupid, but I always imagined oil rigs as boats, when in fact they are very much stationary.  Rachel and I were both expecting to see tons of oil globules floating across the bay from BP’s disaster in 2010, but this was also not so.  The water looked pretty clear as far as I could tell, and we even saw dolphins swimming in the bay.  We left Gulf Shores pretty late in the day, so that night we just paid for a lovely campsite at Dauphin Island Campground.

The next day (December 30) we biked across the rest of Alabama and stopped for the night to camp in a church graveyard about two miles from the Mississippi border.  It was the Friday night before New Years Eve and we really weren’t expecting anyone to go to church or visit the graveyard.  We were wrong on both counts.  As I was putting pans away after dinner, we noticed all the lights come on in the church and a woman and a small girl walking through the graveyard.  I wasn’t even being particularly quiet (Rachel had to “shush” me several times).  So then we were faced with the delima of, “Do we introduce ourselves and say, ‘Hello we’re camping in your graveyard for the evening’ and risk getting asked to leave when it’s pitch black out?”; or “Do we stay in the tent and hope they don’t call the cops and if they find us beg for forgiveness?”  We decided to opt for the latter, and even though the graveyard was small and we weren’t well hidden, either no one saw us or no one cared.  Regardless, I still had strange dreams about the ghost of Bob Hope coming to get me in the night.

We spent New Years Eve biking 63 miles into Mississippi to party it up in the Wiggins Hampton Inn.  And by “party it up”, I mean order a pizza, watch Kathy Griffin make Anderson Cooper blush on CNN, and fall asleep by approximately 12:01am.  Bike touring isn’t always exciting adventure, folks!  We stayed an extra day at the Hampton Inn so I could start the New Year off right by getting some video editing done (it’s finished!  New video up soon, I promise!) and also because the cold temperatures were starting to sweep in.

January 2, we biked into Louisiana.  Again, it was supposed to be freezing at night so we shelled out $40 to stay at one of those scary motels where people live there and argue openly in the parking lot very loudly and the deadbolt on your door is flimsy.  There were some questionable stains on the mattress, so Rachel and I ended up sleeping (very cozily, at least!) in our sleeping bags on top of the bed.  Oh Bogalusa.  What a lovely welcome into Louisiana.

January 3 was still in the upper 20s at night, so we stayed at a slightly nicer motel in Covington.  It was pretty windy (in the wrong direction) that day, so we took it easy and stopped early so we could use the internet and get some work done.

The next day we biked a very lazy 32 miles to Punkin Park Campground in Hammond.  On the way we stopped for lunch at a delicious soul food diner and Rachel had her first real chicken and dumplings.  I was pretty glad the weather had finally warmed up enough to camp again.  It’s weird, but I’m finding that I sleep better in the tent than in the motels.  I also have WAY less allergy issues when I’m camping outside instead of sleeping in a dusty/mildewy motel room.

January 5 we made it to Rachel’s cousin’s house in Gonzales!  It’s been great spending the last few days hanging out with Titus and his wife and eating amazing Cajun food (like grilled oysters) and drinking the local beer and trying legit home-brewed moonshine for the first time (not brewed by Spring and Titus, though).  Yesterday we interviewed an amazing high school student in Baton Rouge who created a video that went viral about the injustices of child marriages and the importance of education for girls.  Gabriella is AWESOME and I can’t wait to edit our interview with her!

Tomorrow we’re going to New Orleans, where we hope to get a few more interviews before we head west for Austin, Texas.  Stay tuned for more updates!

Not to sound dramatic or anything, but I’m pretty sure we just spent two weeks in Hell.

Monday, December 5th, 2011 Posted by Jessica. Published under Riding. 6 Comments.

I know I probably sound like an enormous wimp to cry on my website that riding through south Florida in November was Hell.  “South Florida?  The land of sunshine and fresh squeezed orange juice and senior citizens and key lime pie and delicious Cuban food….is Hell?”  Lesson of the last two weeks: adjust your expectations of this bike trip to having NO expectations.

As Rachel wrote earlier, things started going downhill for us after we left Orlando.  The scenery went from Disney World to stagnant swamp in about a day’s worth of riding.  We were imagining our ride to the Everglades would include passing through cute towns where we could buy fresh orange juice and key lime pie and try Cuban food for the first time.  What we discovered is we were lucky if we even came across a gas station that had clean water to drink.  What made it even worse was that there was hardly anywhere to stay the night.  Looking at the map, we were surrounded by nature preserves.  “Great!”, we initially thought.  We could just camp in the nature preserves like we did across Georgia.  Well unless we wanted to pitch the tent in an alligator-filled swamp, we quickly realized that this would be impossible.

With few options, we ended up making due with what we had:

• Spending a night camping on a very small island in an alligator-infested swamp of an airboat tour company.  It was only $13 and there was no drinkable water.  BUT!  The managers said we could use the shower they had.  We had been riding for several days with strong head winds and rain and were covered in dirt the road was spitting up at us, so we jumped at this opportunity.  We should have rethought this idea when the manager literally had to break the padlock to the shower with a bolt cutter because the shower hadn’t been used in so long that the lock would no longer open and there were disagreements among the employees about what the combination was anyway.  The manager then advised us to pour some bleach in the brown (but maybe was once white or yellow?) shower from the spider web-encrusted Clorox bottle (which included mummified spider remains) lying next to the shower.  The manager then reminded us not to drink the shower water because it’s pumped directly from the swamp.  We showered anyway. (Yes, we were THAT dirty)

• We camped in a dude’s yard on Lake Okeechobee.  Call me jaded, but I’ve never seen so many terrifyingly bright colored enormous spiders in my entire life.  I will probably still have nightmares about them years from now.  The guy was nice.  He was older and lived alone and moved to the area from New York City to retire on the lake.  He asked us if we wanted to drink wine with him and we politely said “no”.  He ended up bringing us a bottle anyway and Rachel and I wiped the mold off the outside lip and drank it anyway.  It was a German riesling.  Not too bad.  We laid in the tent with the rainfly off and looked at the millions of stars (and a few shooting stars) and listened to the hum of the mosquitoes outside.  The next day while taking a break from riding, I opened up my handlebar bag to discover about 3 dozen (very large) fire ants all over the inside flap.  In the panic that ensued, Rachel urged me to put the filthy socks I had drying on top of my pannier on my hands to knock them away.  It worked, but I’m still picking red ant pieces out of the wool.

• When we finally came across a real campground with a real shower and a real laundry facility in South Bay, we were beyond excited.  To add to this, there was an air conditioned rec room where we met another bike touring couple who have already biked across the country….(are you ready for this?)…..on $50 beach cruisers.  Proof, my friends, that you don’t need a $2,000 bike to tour comfortably.  Jess and Dan were so cool– we traded stories from the road and talked about our plans for the future.  They’re planning to hike the entire Appalachian trail in March, and after seeing how well they manage on so little and hearing stories about running out of water in the desert and still making it through, I have no doubts that they’ll make it to Maine.  If Rachel and I are half-feral from our 3 months of traveling to the point that we’re willing to sleep in an alligator pit and shower in swamp water, Jess and Dan are straight up wild.  Meeting them was the silver lining that was our trip to south Florida.

• Then, of course as you’ve already read, we ended up staying at the Miccosukee Indian Casino for a night because we’d ridden for way too long without seeing anything but swamp on a very narrow (but very busy) road with no shoulder and a strong headwind.  Rachel had an emotional meltdown and was very close to ending the trip, and we scheduled to rent a car to drive us the hell out.

I’m not exactly sure why I thought that after riding a week through nothing but swamp, that I would get to the Everglades National Park and it would look different.  Because it didn’t.  Except for the fact that there were even more mosquitoes and even bigger fire ants than at Lake Okeechobee.  We had already booked and paid for a week of camping there, so we were sort of stuck.  When we checked in at the ranger station, both rangers on duty remarked, “Wow!  You’re staying here a LONG time!” 

Apparently, we came to the Everglades at the wrong time.  We thought we had beat the Thanksgiving crowd when we biked the 45 miles from the entrance into the Flamingo campground several days before Thanksgiving and there were only 2 other tents set up in the whole campground.  Over the week, this number grew to maybe 12 tents at most (and the campground is very large).  It was very hot and humid and there was no shade or shelter anywhere and in the morning and evening the mosquitoes were bad enough to drive you completely mad.  We started eating dinner at 4pm to make sure we had enough time to clean up and scramble in the tent for the night before we got eaten alive.

We had read online that there was a very good restaurant at the park, complete with a delicious breakfast buffet so we were excited at the prospect of at least eating something besides powdered soup and tortillas for another week.  This excitement was crushed when we rode the 45 miles into the park and discovered that the restaurant was destroyed by Hurricane Wilma  in 2005 and hadn’t been rebuilt.    

THEN, a vulture sat on our tent and broke a 1-inch chunk out of one of our tent poles.  Thank god Rachel’s German and we all know they’re excellent engineers, because she managed to somewhat fix it with a coke can and duct tape.

We bought ridiculous bug net shirts so we could try to hike some of the trails without the mosquitoes devouring us, only to discover that because it was still the off-season the trails were all completely grown over and unsafe to walk because of the risk of stepping on a cobra nest or something of the like.  This was on Thanksgiving, and we were so tired and defeated we decided to just make sandwiches for dinner to eat in the tent.  It’s amazing how when you’re completely cutoff from the world (we had no phone reception and didn’t have internet obviously) major holidays like Thanksgiving don’t seem real.  It was just another hot, humid, mosquitoey, lacking-in-shade day at Everglades National Park.

The next day around 2pm, Rachel decided she wanted to make Thanksgiving dinner for real.  She peeled the two sweet potatoes we bought the week before and chopped them up, put them in a pot, filled it with water, and discovered it was so incredibly windy that our stove wouldn’t stay lit.  With no other shelter options, we loaded up our arms and pockets with the food, stove, utensils, etc and walked to the women’s bathroom to cook our day-late Thanksgiving dinner (which really ended up consisting of soggy croutons and mashed sweet potatoes with vegetable oil…sorry, Rachel).  We set the pot and stove up on the sink right next to the automatic hand dryer that kept roaring to life with hurricane-force winds every time we stirred.  That’s when I had my meltdown.  Our lives just felt so sad.  The people we meet always tell us stuff like, “You’re living the dream!”  Whose dream was this?  I hadn’t cried that hard in years.  I was ready to quit.  Anything just to get out of the heat, lack of shade, mosquitoes, and humidity.  And then I was angry at myself for wanting to quit.  For wanting to throw away everything Rachel and I spent over a year preparing for.

In the end, I think it was the pep talks from strangers we met at the campground that kept us going.  Everyone told us we had to keep going, that it would get better.  That we’d feel better once we were somewhere else.  They were right.  Rachel was deliriously happy when we picked up the rental car in Homestead.  I was mostly just shell shocked still.  After spending several days in St. Pete’s Beach in Tampa with Rachel’s mom (who happened to be in the area for a conference) and finally eating lots of delicious Cuban food and key lime pie, I’m feeling much better.  Seeing the reactions we received from our latest video that we posted has completely re-energized both of us.

I know it’s a little late for doing the whole, “What are you thankful for this year?” thing, but I just wanted to express my sincere gratitude to our friends and families and our readers (who are really just super awesome friends we haven’t met yet) for not only putting up with us, but also supporting us as we learn the hard lessons of life, like the fact that sometimes even bike touring really sucks.  You guys are all real gems and are giving us the strength to pedal ourselves West.  Thank you.

PS: Don’t feel bad if you laughed while you read this post.  Rereading it now, we’re laughing too.  Ahh, life!

Atlanta to Savannah

Monday, October 31st, 2011 Posted by Jessica. Published under Personal Stories, Riding. 2 Comments.

Greetings from St. Simons Island, Georgia!  It was an exciting trip to get here, which included a few days stay in Savannah.  I’ll try to recap a bit here:

We left our awesome friend Kyle in Atlanta and headed southeast.  We meant to bike 40 miles a day and make it to Savannah in 6 days.  However, between the hills (did you know many parts of Georgia have a TON of steep hills?  Yeah, neither did we…) and each of us getting sick (not at the same time, though– that would be too easy), we were delayed a day in our arrival.

Rachel and I with our very awesome (and very tall) friend Kyle in Atlanta

I’m realizing more and more on this trip that bike touring is all about serendipity.  Our first day out from Atlanta, Rachel felt like crap.  We thought it was allergies and the hills, but it turned out to be a pretty nasty cold.  We made it only 25 miles to the town of Conyers before Rachel was ready to collapse.  We were taking a break outside of a grocery store when a car drove up behind us and stopped.  “Oh crap, it’s a dude who’s going to ask us if we have a flat tire or something”, I thought.  Instead, a woman got out of the car.  Charlotte was an avid bicyclist with a niece who just finished hiking the entire Appalachian Trail.  She was so thankful to the strangers who took in her niece during her trip, that she wanted to pay it forward and offered us her guest bedroom for the night.  We were hesitant at first, because in our minds we had 20 more miles to go.  However, Rachel was feeling worse by the minute so we took her up on the offer.  And I’m so glad we did!  Charlotte and her partner Jan were awesome.  Not only did we get taken out to dinner, but they had a huge breakfast for us the next morning.  What’s more, Charlotte is from Florida and knows folks where we’re going and arranged people for us to stay with when we get to Miami and the Everglades.

Rachel and Charlotte (who rode with us for a bit)

Charlotte and Jan rescue dogs that are dumped out in the country and find homes for them (many times up north), so we had a great time playing with all six of their dogs.  Rachel and I have decided we want to adopt one of their dogs once we’re finished with the bike trip and are settled somewhere for longer than a few months.  Maybe in three years or so?

From Jan and Charlotte’s we biked another 43 miles before stopping in the Oconee National Forest where we stayed in the backyard of a man named Judd on the day before deer hunting season.  Judd was a swell, backwoodsy kind-of-guy who liked to hunt deer in his own back yard.  He was excited for our trip, but admitted he’d “beat our asses” if we were his daughters– “Don’t you know there’s crazy people out there???”  His old job used to consist of stringing telephone wires all over Georgia, so he knew the back roads well.  His girlfriend was really sweet and told me that if we’re ever passing through the area again, to remember that we have family there now and not to hesitate to stay with them again.

Five miles after leaving Jud’s I got a flat tire.  It’s a good thing I listened during my bike maintenance class in Boston about how to patch a flat, because the spare tubes I was sold were for 700c tires (even though I know I distinctly remember telling the sales person that I ride 26″ wheels).  By the time I finally took all the stuff off my bike, flipped it over, took off the wheel, took off the tire, found the whole in the tube, patched it, and put everything back together again, well over an hour had passed.  Combined with the fact that the high that day was in the upper 80s and the hills just kept getting bigger, we stopped early for the day and got our first motel room of the trip in Milledgeville (which is apparently Georgia’s former state capital).

It wasn’t until the next day while camped out in an elderly couple’s front yard that I started to get sick.  We’ve discovered it’s too easy to pass off legitimate sickness as allergies while bike touring.  “Of course we’re tired and our bones hurt!  We’ve been biking all day!”  I thought I was allergic to the tree we were sleeping under, because I spent the whole night not being able to breathe at all.  The next day was 90 degrees out and I felt awful.  We only biked 40 miles that day, but it was absolutely the hardest day for me this whole trip.  Between the heat, the hills, my fever, and the fact that I couldn’t breathe, I was completely miserable.  By the time we rolled into Swainsboro and were trying to find the Best Western, I was sobbing uncontrollably.  The water I was drinking was hot.  I just couldn’t get myself to cool down.  We ended up giving up 1/2 of a mile from the Best Western and settling for a seedy/smokey room at a really cheap motel because I needed a cold shower asap.

The next day I felt much better and we managed to bike 45 miles to basically the middle of nowhere.  Lo and behold: the earth flattened out!  I don’t think this town even had a name, but it was 45 miles outside of Savannah, which is why we decided to stop there for the night.  The churches in the area were all a bit too exposed for camping, so we “settled” on staying in the vast front yard of a mansion.  The matron of the house was very sweet and gave us free range of her well water.  Rain hammered on the tent all night, but we were warm and dry inside.  The next morning we hung out with two of the guys who were working on renovating the house.  We told them about or trip and they told us about their lives.  We remarked about how nice and flat it had gotten and one of them responded with, “In this town there’s a road called Rich Man’s Hill, because you’d have to be a REALLY rich man to own a hill in this part of Georgia!”

Woke up the next morning to a little tree frog trying to hitch a free ride on my pannier. I don't think so, buddy!

Savannah was great!  We stayed with a wonderful couchsurfing.org host named Erin and her giant, but very sweet (although incredibly flatulent) french bull dog, Petunia.  Savannah has a very old, but quaint southern feel to it.  We checked out the Colonial Park Cemetery, stood in front of Flannery O’Connor’s house (it was closed and cost money so I doubt we would have gone in anyway), walked along the Savannah River, and took a day bus to Tybee Island, where we then biked to Fort Pulaski, stood in the Atlantic Ocean, and ate THE BEST BARBECUE EVER.

It took us two days to bike to St. Simons Island, where we’re now having a great time staying with family friends of mine.  We’ve spent the time video editing, checking out the local sights, and interviewing kick ass inspiring women.  We even made the local paper!  Next stop: Orlando!

Atlanta: The Secretly Awesome City

Monday, October 17th, 2011 Posted by Jessica. Published under Personal Stories, Riding. 2 Comments.

I’m going to be honest, here: neither of us wanted to go to Atlanta.  Growing up in east Tennessee, I only traveled to Atlanta to fly out of the international airport for cheaper.  Rachel only ever got as far as Acworth to visit her grandfather, which, after biking through it last week, I can safely say it isn’t a town to brag about.  However, Rachel really wanted to visit Savannah (we’ve heard such nice things about it!), and the best way to avoid biking through the Appalachian mountains from the Smokys was to bike around them and through Atlanta.

I reached out to a friend I knew in college who’s a huge bike geek here in Atlanta.  Not only did he offer Rachel and I his entire apartment for the week while he stayed with his girlfriend down the street, but he also contacted every bicycling person he knew in the area to meet with us and give us leads on people to interview.  Thanks, Kyle!!  The people he introduced us to welcomed us with open arms, and we spent a lovely evening bicycling around Atlanta with several of them.  I forgot how much fun it is to bike through a city with a large group of people at night!

Between Kyle’s contacts and the effort of another friend of a friend, we got close to 100 email requests from women interested in being interviewed for our film project!  We simply didn’t have time to meet all of them, so we picked a promising handful and are very excited with the footage we’ve gotten.  We met Jill, a recovered bulimic now raising two teenage daughters in a world in which she believes the pressures young women feel are worse than ever before.  We also met Carol, a homemaker in the midst of menopause searching for paid employment for the first time in decades.  Then there was Sara, a breast cancer survivor/entrepreneur/endurance athlete, who incorporated bicycling into her recovery process.  I’m not going to give away the other interviews we got, because every one of them was just as inspiring as these women.

I’m finally feeling like we’re onto something right.  Or at least on the way to on to something right.  I just hope we can have as good of luck down the road.  Atlanta has definitely been our favorite city, so far.  Who the hell would have thought?  Thank you for your hospitality, Atlanta!  We owe you a big one!

Here I Am

Thursday, October 6th, 2011 Posted by Jessica. Published under Personal Stories, Riding. 3 Comments.

Atlanta, GA.

I know this blog post has been needed for a long time now, considering Rachel and I are now into month 2 of our bicycling adventures together.  The truth is, everything I’ve been experiencing since September 1 has been incredibly (wonderfully) overwhelming.

I left September 1st from Verona, WI utterly terrified.  It’s probably hard to tell from our first video from the road, but I was almost crying as I hugged Rachel’s family goodbye.  I just didn’t know if we could do it.  I thought for sure our kitty litter buckets would fall off our bikes at mile 2 and one of us would crash into a ditch because of all the weight on our bikes.  On all the bike blogs I read before our trip, everyone advised to load up our bikes with all of our gear and go for a short test ride overnight somewhere.  Well, we didn’t.  Probably stupidly, we never went on a real fully-loaded bike tour before September 1.  And I’m really glad we didn’t, now.  Between the hills and Rachel getting heat stroke, that first day was REALLY hard and equally scary and I’m pretty sure if we’d tried to go on an overnight tour with all our stuff before our official launch, the initial difficulties of riding 50-60 miles with 100 lbs beneath us would have scared us out of attempting this adventure.  And I wouldn’t be sitting here now in Atlanta, Georgia proud of us for making it this far already.

I think I woke up every morning for about the first week or so asking myself, “Can we really do this?” and not being too sure of the answer.  I’m much more confident now, and Rachel is too.  Both of us have gown in wisdom, I think, already in our first month of bike touring.  As Rachel wrote earlier, we’ve learned that it’s better for us to slow down and not bike more than 50 miles a day.  40-45 miles is best.  Not only does this keep us in better moods with each other (which it’s extremely important to be on good terms with the person you’re bike touring with!), but it also allows us time in the afternoon/evening to read, write, cook dinner in daylight, and not go to bed utterly exhausted.  Also, we’re on this bike tour because we want to SEE the country– not rush through it!  When we’re not trying to bike 60 miles before the sun goes down, we have time to explore old cemeteries, visit national battlefield sites, eat farm fresh ice cream right from the farm, and meet the locals.

We’re also growing more confident with finding a place to stay the night.  Everyone we meet asks us if we’re staying in motels every night.  I don’t know if that’s because we don’t look tough enough to pitch a tent and use a camp stove, or if they just can’t fathom bike touring without motel stays.  So far, we’ve had amazing experiences CouchSurfing and staying with friends, but we’ve had equally great experiences camping in the backyard of a veterinarian’s office, behind a family practice doctor’s office, the backyard of a church, and behind a stranger’s house.  Sometimes I’d get a little creeped out (it didn’t help that I picked up a copy of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood for some delightful tour reading at a used bookstore in Chicago) and the sound of a raccoon rustling in the bushes was enough to give me goosebumps.  But it’s getting easier as we go on.  And a lot of times it’s quieter to stealth camp than to pay for a spot at a campground (unless you park your tent 1/4 of a mile from some very busy train tracks like we did outside of Madisonville, TN).

I’m excited.  About everything.  There’s so much to look forward to.  Even this afternoon, when we’re going to meet with some amazing folks from Atlanta’s bicycle activism community.  I’ve never been so happy to live in the present in my whole life.  New videos coming soon!

Product Review: Garmin GPSMap 62s

Thursday, September 8th, 2011 Posted by Jessica. Published under Gear + Product Review, Riding. No Comments.

Caveat first: In the last few days, I’ve gotten loads of advice (some of which I will discuss below) about how to better navigate with our GPS, but the follow is pretty definitively my view about our chosen navigation system.

If you’re a regular reader, you may remember my post from a few months ago lamenting that trying to find a GPS system for a bike tour is a difficult process.  Well… Jessica and I still feel that it is even though we settled on the Garmin GPSMap 62s.  We did this after reading a ton, deciding not to get one right away (at least until we’d ridden a few hundred miles), but then did end up getting one when REI had a sale this past spring/summer and it was a real deal.

The pros are that it’s waterproof and light and it runs off 2 – AA batteries that are very tightly seated (so no popping out if dropped).  It didn’t come with street navigation loaded but the software wasn’t unaffordable ($80) and easy enough to load.  Even when I had a bit of trouble the tech support was friendly, patient and well spoken. Once the City Navigator software is loaded, you are, in theory, able to just plug in an address and it will do turn by turn on city streets, so it then basically becomes a car GPS as well, but more on the in theory part in a sec.

The cons, which took a while to really suss out, are a few, but one might consider them big.  First of all, in the age of touch screens it really takes a fairly long learning curve to figure out how to access each function.  The manual is useless, so I had to learn it from doing.  Eventually, I got it all down pat, but there were a few times in which I was just pushing buttons at random with no knowledge of how to repeat what I’d done.  It’s possible that a person coming from another hiker friendly GPS will find it easier, but I had only previously had experience with car GPSes that are pretty intuitive and simple.

Another major con, that took us until very recently to figure out, is that if you are traveling through many states (long distances), you have to load waypoints for much further along the route if you want it to work all that way.  To explain a bit clearer: On Wednesday night before we left last week, I loaded a route through the City Navigator software to get us from Madison, WI to Johnson Creek, WI.  It worked great.  It re-routed when we veered off track and followed us along.  The next morning though, I tried to simply enter in the address to take whatever it suggested to Delafield, WI but it couldn’t find it.  It also couldn’t find Milwaukee.  Strange, but I couldn’t be bothered to work it out just then because it was taking precious early morning/ cool riding minutes.

Turns out that since I hadn’t loaded a waypoint or a route for further along, it didn’t see that part of the world as existing.  I turned the GPS on to track our miles because the trip computer is very nice, but halfway there and suddenly it was just a pointy blue arrow floating in a checker board screen.

Lesson learned: load more than just a day’s worth of routes or waypoints in and it will load the maps and you can make changes along the way!

And lastly, the other big con is that since there is virtually no Garmin software out there that takes bikes into consideration, there is no way to route along a bike path.  Now, we’ve gotten great advice on other programs to use and we’ve confirmed that Adventure Cycling Association routes will load on as well, but we have yet to try anything else.  I think we’ll try Map My Ride or something else here as we head out from Evanston, IL towards Carmel, IN at the end of this week because the only way to get through Chicago is going to be on bike paths.  I’ll update my review at that point, but as of today, it’s a frustrating point.

In the end, it has great functions and I don’t regret it.  I think it’s the most adaptable device for what we need.  I love that it’s water and shock proof.  I love that it’s light and runs off simple batteries.  I love that it can do turn by turn and that it re-routes you even if you’ve programmed a route with the software and downloaded it.  I love that it’s pretty easy to download the routes once you get the hang of it too.

BUT, both Jessica and I really wish that it just had 3 or 4G capabilities and ran Google maps instead.  If someone were to just make a low power (ie: last forever), waterproof device that ran off Google bike routes instead, we’d immediately return this puppy without a second thought.  It’s better than pulling our phones out every turn and again, I think it’s the best choice for a bike tourist right now, but it just isn’t cutting it as an easy to use, fool proof router.  Anyone want to make that other device?

I’m starting to get nervy….

Friday, August 26th, 2011 Posted by Jessica. Published under Bike Tour Preparations, Personal Stories. 3 Comments.

As our launch date (September 1) draws closer, I’m starting to get (probably normal) pre-launch jitters.  Over the past week, I find myself lying in bed at night unable to sleep.  I’m starting to worry about everything from the weather (What if it’s too hot when we launch?  What if it starts thundering while we’re sleeping in our tents under trees?), to our gear (Do we have everything?  Are we bringing too much?  That boom pole is WAY longer than we were expecting!), to our safety (What if we ARE axe murdered????? What if one of us gets hit by a car again?), to our film project (What if no one wants to talk to us?  What if there’s no story?  What if we fail to film ourselves and our story adequately?), to our general preparedness (We’re insane– we’ve barely biked further than 60 miles so far and now we’re trying to bike across America– what if we can’t do it?)

I’m sure this is all perfectly normal (please god someone tell me this is all perfectly normal!!!), and that once we’re on the road we’ll start to work all the kinks out.  I keep reminding myself that we’re bike touring the USA, not Antarctica; anything we need will be relatively easy to find.  I’m also trying very hard to ignore the “larger picture” of biking across the whole USA, and instead concentrate on “Where are we going to stay the first night?”

People keep asking Rachel and I if we’re worried about how well we’ll get along with just the two of us and our bikes for the next year.  To be honest, that’s one of the things I’m LEAST worried about.  I’m sure we’ll have arguments (especially when I’m PMSing or when Rachel thinks she’s lost something), but on the whole I feel like we’re kind of going to have to be at the mercy of each other.  I have the cooking skills.  Rachel has the camping/survival skills.  I know bike maintenance.  Rachel knows where the hell we’re going.  I bring the comedic relief.  Rachel brings the practical organization.  We’re genuinely a really good team when we’re filming.  We have different video editing styles, but working that out is all part of the filmmaking process anyway.

Reflecting on all of this is certainly helping to make me feel better.  I’m sure I’ve got several more sleepless nights to come over the next week, though.  I keep alternating between feeling like, “Yay!  I want to leave NOW!” to “Oh shit nothing’s ready!”

I know we’re risking a lot in doing this trip, but what’s even truer is that not taking this risk would mean I’d be scolding myself for who-knows-how-long for not living the life I wanted.

Goodbye, Boston!! Hello…adventure?

Saturday, July 30th, 2011 Posted by Jessica. Published under Bike Tour Preparations, Personal Stories. 5 Comments.

Photo credit: Sabrina Scott, taken at our first going away party.  Check our her blog, Nocturnalamore!

Sorry if this post is somewhat confusing.  I genuinely feel like after having heart surgery, leaving my job, packing up my life in Boston, saying “so long” to some of the greatest people I’ve ever known, and driving 19 hours with my worldly possessions– all in the last two weeks…I’m feeling a bit numb.

Quick health update: I had my pacemaker surgery scheduled before my health insurance went away and the surgery itself was great.  We’ll have a video posted as soon as we have time to catch our breaths.  I’m still having some issues settling into my new ticker (as in, at precisely 11:26pm EVERY NIGHT it’s making my heart palpitate for 30 seconds.  Any ideas as to what could be causing this?), but fixing it is going to have to wait until I have health insurance again.  Maybe I’ll be used to the quirks by then.

Leaving Boston was much more difficult for me than I expected it to be.  I left Tennessee for upstate New York when I was 18 with ease.  I left upstate New York at 22 for Boston with no issues.  But suddenly instead of all my friends going off and leaving at the same time as me, I’m leaving my whole life behind.  I only lived in Boston 3 years, but I really feel like I made lifelong friends.  Rachel and I don’t know where we’re going to relocate after our bike trip, but there’s a good chance it won’t be Boston.  With my parents in Cincinnati and Rachel’s parents in Madison, splitting the difference and living in Chicago just makes more sense somehow.  Add to this the fact that Boston is literally the first place I’ve LIKED living, I’m genuinely curious about other parts of the country.  I hear Chicago’s pretty nice.  We’ll see.  We can always come back to Boston.  I miss everyone already.

Rachel and I left Boston at 10pm on Thursday night for Madison, WI, after two separate going away parties.  We woke up at 8am and started loading Rachel’s van.  We have so much crap.  Ugh.  How did we let this happen???  We’re trying really hard to pear down our lives, and we did donate a ton to Goodwill and sell a lot of stuff, but still:  SO. MUCH. CRAP.  We had to load, unload, and reload the van countless times on Thursday– trying to get everything to fit.  Once we fit it all in, Rachel gasped in horror at how dangerously low the van was sitting.  “Like a race car!”, I said.

We discussed.  Could we get a Uhaul trailer on this short of notice?  We’d have to get a hitch installed, too.  It was going to cost $400, total.  We decided to ship 10 of our boxes, figuring at least if it ended up costing $400 it’d be less of a hassle than using a trailer.  Luckily, it only cost about $160.  Then we spent over an hour tying large items like two snowboards, a side table, and an easel to the top of the van.  I would be surprised that nothing’s flown off yet if I hadn’t seen Rachel tie so many meticulous knots all over.  Once again, the van sunk about 8 inches.  “Don’t drive over 55,” Rachel said.

Once all this was done, it was 10pm.  Rachel and I hadn’t had dinner yet, but we just wanted to get going.  We said tearful goodbyes to our lovely roommates and set off.  Rachel was driving, but within 3 hours we were both ready to collapse.  We hadn’t even made it out of Massachusetts yet.  Rather than risk driving an overburdened van with two exhausted drivers, we stayed at a mildewy EconoLodge for the night.  We got up at 8:30 the next morning to find the van had sunk further.  I don’t know anything about cars, but Rachel was worried we were breaking the frame.  We decided to press on, cautiously.

Driving 55mph on I-90 feels like crawling when everyone around you is going 70.  On the upside, I learned how to use the cruise control function, since there was literally no other way to keep the van going 55mph otherwise.  The van kept sinking lower and lower.  We made it to the PA border before Rachel decided something had to be done.  We called up a few rental car places, and short of turning around and driving back to Buffalo, the closest car rental place was in Toledo, OH– about 4.5 hours away.  We’d have the car for 24 hours and we could put half our stuff in and gun it to Madison with the weight off the van.  We’d roll into Madison sometime after 3am and it was going to cost almost $300.  At that point, I was ready to leave all our stuff on the side of the road.  Then I remembered Columbus, OH is only about 2 hours away from my parents’ house.  We Google Mapped it and saw that Columbus was less than 5 hours from where we were.  Figuring, “What’s 30 more minutes?”, I called my dad up and asked him if he could possibly meet us in Columbus in 5 hours.  He said, “Of course!  Then what are you going to do?”

Rachel and I met him in a Wal-Mart parking lot just south of Columbus at 11pm, loaded half the stuff into my dad’s Rav4, and then followed him to Cincinnati.  My mom, dad, and grandma are thrilled we’re visiting.  Rachel and I are staying here until Monday– hopefully we’ll be a bit more rested by then.  Since we’re leaving the majority of our stuff in my closet in my bedroom here, the van should be fine for the drive.

When Rachel’s mother called to ask what our plans were for when we met my dad in Columbus, after telling her we were going to stay in Cincinnati a few days, I added: “I guess when I quit my job last week, this was the adventure I was looking for.”  We haven’t even hopped on our bikes yet, and already we’re meandering around the United States.

Pacemakers and Such Part 2…

Wednesday, July 13th, 2011 Posted by Jessica. Published under Bike Tour Preparations. No Comments.

Three days later, I had a pacemaker put in. I wish I could say the surgery was easy and I’ve been right as rain ever since. But I can’t. The cardiologist I had in Oak Ridge, Tennessee had never put a pacemaker in anyone under the age of 75 and so of course he set my pacemaker to extremely high settings. These settings made my heart race all the time and for the first six months after the surgery, I felt WORSE than when my heart wasn’t beating at all. To remedy my heart racing, instead of adjusting the settings on my pacemaker, he wrote me prescriptions for medication to slow my heart down. Again, I felt 1,000% crappier than when I was just a kid with weird blackouts. When he got to the point of telling my parents he wanted to put me under the knife again and permanently make my heart unable to beat on its own so I could be 100% pacemaker-controlled, we switched doctors to a pediatric cardiologist in Knoxville.

The doctor in Knoxville balked at the settings my pacemaker was set to and turned them down so low my pacemaker was almost off. I stopped taking the heart medication and I’ve been fine ever since. For eight years, I used my pacemaker a whole 2% of the time. The rest of my heartbeats were all my own. Two years ago, I started using my pacemaker 4% of the time. It’s not much, but my cardiologist reminds me often that 4% of the time is still hundreds of thousands of heartbeats. It adds up to my heart not beating almost a full hour every day. I guess that’s significant.

When I had my pacemaker put in, I was told it could last up to 10 years. At 15, I remember thinking, “25 is SO FAR AWAY! I’ll probably be married with kids by then!” Here I am, 25, not married, no kids– not even any pets, and in need of a new pacemaker. I’m still basically as weird and awkward as I was at 15, too. How time flies.

This surgery is annoying because the interface for the battery indicator for my pacemaker is shitty. The indicator looks like a car gas gauge, with “full”, “halfway”, and “empty” markings. I’ve spent the last year going to the cardiologist every three months (when I normally go 1-2 times a year) because my battery indicator was halfway between the “halfway” point and “empty”. I wanted to have surgery in April to make sure I would be all set for the next ten years without having to worry about needing a new one in the middle of the trip, but the cardiologist said the battery wasn’t drained enough and my insurance company wouldn’t cover it. We both assumed that at this rate, I’d be fine for AT LEAST another year, if not two. After all, I only use it 4% of the time. I went in last week for one final checkup before my farewell to Boston to find that the pacemaker battery indicator was right on the cusp of being empty. And now I’m anxiously waiting for a call from the scheduling department at my hospital so I can try to get a surgery scheduled before next Friday (when I leave my job/good health insurance) so I don’t have to pay upwards of $2,000 for a new pacemaker.

I know this was practically a novel, but hopefully this explains everything a little better than that video I edited together in a flash. I’ll post more updates as they come. Thanks to everyone for your well-wishes!