Hey folks, this our first journal in CycleBlaze and I wanted to give you a little background about who we are and what went into this ride. 

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My wife Ellen and I are both late 50s professionals on the tale end of our careers. I'm an IT manager and she's an office admin. Since we're both still working, it's unusual for us to get more than a week of time off, but ever since our youngest son graduated from college two years ago, we've been trying to put an extended vacation/bike ride together. 

We live in Towson, a suburb North of Baltimore and we spend lots of our spare time riding on trails in and around our area. There's really nice riding options near us and we have tons of additional trails around the DC area and in Pennsylvania which is only about 30 minutes North of us. We often times find ourselves putting big groups together for interesting single day social rides on rail/trails or even 3-4 day rides on some of the more well known trails in the mid Atlantic. 

For some reason, I've always had a bucket list item of wanting to ride my bike in the Alps. I'm not enamored with the idea of climbing hill after hill though. So when I eventually heard about the Rhine Route which starts in the alps but primarily runs down hill, I began pushing Ellen to coordinate a trip to Europe with me to try to ride it for 2 or 3 weeks. 

As our kids finished school, we upped the urgency on putting this trip together. We had thought about doing it in the summer, but we both felt we'd be spending most (if not all) our nights at hotels and Airbnb type places. So we wanted to do this after the European summer holiday season and early in September when we'd have a better chance at booking a room in just about any town we hit. 

Our work schedules in the fall of 2023 prevented us from putting a trip together, but we were finally able to settle on some time in early September of this year (2024).  So all year we've been gradually putting the pieces of the trip together... plane tickets, basic itineraries, bike shipping options... etc. 

In prepping for this trip, we got a ton of useful advice from the EuroVelo Discussion Facebook Group. And we felt we wanted to sort of pay it forward by sharing our trip details with future Rhine riders or people who just love this route. Most of the media content in this blog has been shared in daily posts with our friends on Facebook. But it was a little more complicated to also share this properly with the broader bike community. So that's been sort of the impetus behind putting this journal together for our ride earlier this month.

I'm really liking the CycleBlaze blog features though and I intend to use it to document future trips. Thanks in advance for all your comments and input.