Day -90: ticking items off with help

February 12, 2020

Life goes on, and so does tour prep—a bit at a time.

I forgot to mention in the last post: thanks to Kara and the others at RANS for their help.

Thanks to the guys at Kleindorfer’s in Bloomington for helping me get just the right set screw for the steering column

Thanks to Jakob at the Bloomington Bike Project for lending me tools and teaching me how to replace crank sets. I'm a fan. These guys do awesome work for Bloomington.

The trail-a-bike arrived from Idaho. It took a team to get it here. Thanks to Kallton & Baylie from Meridian ID for picking it up. Thanks to Jennifer from Boise ID for selling it.

Ryan and the others at Meridian Cycles really paid attention to detail when they boxed this thing up.

O really wanted to help his daddy put the Piccolo back together.

One of the parts of our trip we’re looking forward to is visiting churches—ours and others—across the country on Sundays. So, I wrote down on our ACA maps all the locations and numbers for the congregations of our church (The Church of Jesus Christ, or what you may call “Mormons”—my friends at work joked that this ride of ours is another Mormon Migration.) transected by our route. So every mile of the way, we’ll have yet another go-to number to call if we need anything.

It's kinda fun to see the route pop out like that.

I thought I'd do something similar with Warm Showers hosts, but there were just too many! It's amazing, really, just how many people are willing to put themselves out there and offer to host. I'm already excited for the kids to meet them.

And orders are trickling in; we’re still waiting on the stove, but we’ve got a couple of jackets. And we just put an order in this weekend for pannier bags. Four tourists out there, here's my estimation of our storage capacity:

Paul: 100 liters (plus L and E)
Clerie: 180 liters (plus O)
J: 100 liters
A: 50 liters

That gives us about 60 liters per person...and we should be strapping the sleeping pads on the outside. Don't know where we'll put the tent—thanks to my alpining friend Trevor Alcott for the suggestion of storing different components of the tent in different bags.

Last week's big question: saddles. Brooks Imperial B17 is supposed to be good at preventing chafing, but Selle Anatomica has no break-in. And do younger kids need good saddles, or is it a non-issue? (Since weight drops more quickly than surface area the younger you go.)

This week's big question: hygeine. There's about a million questions there, about following leave-no-trace principles with a family of seven, preventing UTIs, doing proper hair care, etc. Backpackers and group tourists, feel free to chime in!

And there’s always, always, more bike work to be done.

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jim katzinHi Paul, Sounds like a great adventure! I don't want to get into the saddle wars, but I bought a flyer imperial for perineal relief a couple years ago and found that the chafing was worse than on a standard saddle because of the extra edges around the opening. I'm back on the flyer standard and very content with it. The break in period on these saddles is not that long, in fact the flyer was good right out of the box.
Best of luck - I will be following your trip here on CB.
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4 years ago

Paul StatenThanks, Jim! Now that we have time, I ordered one saddle (Selle Anatomica) and will cycle it through family members to see how it treats them. But most of them did great with the 42 miles this week. (I should probably have them all ride up and down the street tomorrow morning and see if it kills to get in the saddle!)
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4 years ago

Day -90: ticking items off with help

​Life goes on, and so does tour prep—a bit at a time.

Life goes on, and so does tour prep—a bit at a time.