Your "retire and go for a cross-country bike ride" story is similar to mine; mine happened last year. I'll follow along as you go, since I have ridden the Transam I will use your journal to reminisce as you ride those portions. Best of luck,

I have (and ride) two recumbent tandems so I totally get the low gear thing. No reason to be ashamed!

I also sometimes wish the granny was lower than it is; 30x26, even with the 20 inch Bike Friday wheels, isn't enough to get me up a 12-14 percent grade if it's more than about five feet long. Hopefully I will not encounter *too* much of that sort of nonsense this summer...

I'm a little shamed - I am taking off a crankset with that exact gearing. I bought a new to me bike from Florida. I have been saying it has Florida gearing! Instead, I'm putting on a 48-36-24 how low can you go crankset. I think part of my story is that I ride a recumbent, so I can't stand up for a little extra power. I need to spin.

I used my regular computer, which has a 22" diagonal monitor that I run at pretty high resolution. I maximize the browser window and also put the chart on its own tab so it takes the whole screen.

When I copy the screen and paste it into Paint (I live in the Windows world) the original image is nearly the size or my monitor, so it still displays well when it gets scaled down as a CycleBlaze image.

https://www.cycleblaze.com/journals/60/maps/

I hope that comes through. I've created my chart, but it shows up small/not readable. Yours is full size. What didn't I do? I took a screen shot, saved it to photos, and then posted it in my journal. But, it's too small.

My pleasure. I used to do a lot of that sort of thing for a living, so it came easily enough.

Thank you for going to all of that work to explain how to make that graph. I am at least started, because I have a google spread sheet with our mileages, etc. on it.

I appreciate your effort!

My apologies! I forgot what my own chart looked like when I responded above (and I had skipped past it when responding- doh!)

I've added a new "how to" page in the appendix that walks you through the steps needed to create a chart like mine, that shows *each day's* mileage as a column, rather than the summary ten-mile-increment chart I thought I was describing...

https://www.cycleblaze.com/journals/rejuvenation/daily-mileage-chart-a-how-to/

Hi Kelly-

I made the mileage chart using Google Sheets, which is also where my day-by-day planning spreadsheet lives. In one area of the chart I set up the limits of each range, along with formulas that count the number of days that fall in each ten mile increment, and finally the label text for that increment. That area of the spreadsheet became the data source for the chart.

You can do exactly the same thing with Excel, but I've let my MS Office installations go the way of the dodo since my needs are now not only simple but also purely personal (i.e. no need for professional software now that I'm retired).

I'd bet that Open Office would also support the same functionality.

Whichever way you do it, the trick to getting it to show in your journal is to make a screenshot, save it, and post it like any other picture. It becomes a disconnected, brain-dead static image when you do that, of course, but it make the point pretty well and once your plans are close to nailed down there's not much updating needed.

The interactive RWGPS route for my trip is posted on my journal page titled "Route Planning" (https://www.cycleblaze.com/journals/rejuvenation/route-planning/), which is the page that precedes this one.

Note that the map is based on one single gigantic, continuous route that I laid out months ago and then shared so it would show in the journal. I have separate day-by-day routes that I haven't made publicly available but they pretty closely follow the comprehensive public version.

I like your daily mileage graph. Can you point me to where I need to go to make my own?

We have three days of over 60 miles, and one of over 70. All big climbing days, without services all day. Those are going to be on the far side of my fun factor. We do what we must.

Do you have a map of your entire trip? Perhaps I just haven't made note of it.

Hi Kelly

I've spent a bunch of time finishing up the "plan" over the past several days. Where I felt it would be worthwhile (basically, to guarantee accommodations in high-demand areas) I've already made reservations (mostly in and around Yellowstone), but for the rest I've left it at identifying where I'm likely to stay and I'll make reservations a couple days to a couple weeks ahead. That should save me a lot of effort if / when I have to revise the schedule and plan, and also reduces the chances that I'll forget to update one or more after a schedule change and get myself out of synch with the host...

As it stands this is where I am at the moment:
Lodging Type (Number of Nights)
B&B (7)
Campground (25)
Church (1)
Hostel (9)
Hotel (24)
Park (10)
Private Home (7)
Stealth camping (1)
Warm Showers (2)
TOTAL 86

Hi John

Thanks for the tips.

My tool kit already includes a piece of a spoke, bent to serve the purpose you describe for the coat hanger. It saw service during my roadside rescue of Mr. Kim (see the lead-in to Two Days, One Night a few pages earlier in this journal, though I didn't mention it).

I also have some vinyl tape wrapped around a plastic film container (remember when 35mm film came in those); the container now holds an assortment of metric hex head cap screws in case I lose any of the ones on the bike.

I was on the ride where Charmaine's friend substituted zip ties for her front skewer. I may have supplied them, in fact, as they were a permanent part of the collection of useful bits I kept in my rack pack. I'll be sure to add some to my rig fothis tour; thanks for the reminder.

Hi Keith
Here are a couple of lightweight additions to your load.

A master chain link would be useful. (Make sure it's compatible with your chain.)

A small piece of wire. I clip mine off a wire coat hanger, perhaps five inches long, bent at the ends. Use this to hold your chain while you're repairing it.

I only skimmed your list but a small amount of duct tape and a few zip ties could be useful. (Charmaine went on a Bike Friday ride with friends. They drove to the start with bikes folded and such. One of her companions forgot her front skewer. They used zip ties to secure the front wheel. It held!)

Instead of multiple soaps I bring Dr Bronners. I am currently looking for some that is odorless. Bears and other critters might like the fragrance.

"... nowhere near as much ability to revise the routing it selects."

That would be in comparison to what can be accomplished with a real computer that has a keyboard and, more importantly, a mouse attached.

Hi again-

I haven't detailed it in the journal, but much of my time the last few days has gone into "finalizing" the daily routes and targeting overnight accommodations, from about Missoula on eastward to home.

That was driven by the realization / discovery that although you can use the RWGPS mobile app to "plan" a route, you have nowhere near as much ability to revise the routing it selects. This would have been especially annoying when following the Katy Trail across Missouri; RWGPS seems to have a built-in bias toward selecting roads preferentially. I had to manually add control points between nearly *every* place the Katy crosses a road because the auto-selected route wanted to put me on the road (and write cues accordingly).

I cannot *imagine* how irritated I would have gotten to be told _all day long_ that I was off route, for several days in a row, because I was following the rail trail instead of hopping back and forth across it on roads. It would certainly have cast a pall over my mood- something I definitely do *not* need when trying to ride for pleasure.