A lot of thought went into what Alain and Viktoriya should pack for the trip. Viktoriya was responsible for approximately 99% of the thinking. Alain’s contribution was to grab a couple of bike jerseys and bike shorts, arm coolers, some socks, a pair of bike shoes and a pair of running shoes, a T-shirt and a pair of pants. Viktoriya came up with a somewhat more complete list of clothing to take with us.

We have done short one or two week bike trips before but never a 3 month trip. One big difference is that you can ignore your real life, things like paying bills, for a couple of weeks but for a long trip you need to be set up to take care of utility bills for the house we left behind. That meant packing a tablet that we could use to manage our finances on the road. We ended up with an extensive (any heavy) list of electronics. The tablet, 2 cell phones, a GPS, 2 bluetooth headsets that we could use to talk to Jeanna and Kerry, along with chargers and cables.

Once we had assembled our packing list and verified it would fit in our panniers we went for a short test ride. The verdict? The bike was a bit awkward to handle and our cruising speed dropped by 3 or 4 mph, but the baggage was manageable. We decided we were ready for the trip to begin.

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We planned to do laundry every couple of days. After our first stop in Vero Beach we were faced with the fact that packing dirty clothes takes more space than packing clean clothes. Alain attempted to solve this problem during a rest stop on the second day. While Viktoriya was in a Publix supermarket buying drinks and yogurt, Alain took his running shoes out of the pannier and tossed them in a trash can. Voila – lots of extra packing space. When Viktoriya found out about the missing shoes that night she was not amused.