DAILY BLOG

We live in New England, but are starting the bike tour in southern California. Therefore, before we can begin biking, we need to head west! Tomorrow morning (June 20), we begin our “pre-tour road trip”. Heading out from New England in the support vehicle with our bikes on top, we’ll travel 3,000 miles to southern California, so we can begin our bike tour on June 28. Our plans are to make stops in Indiana, Kansas, Utah, and then California over the next few days. We are a bit concerned about the inability to train over the next week, but we’ll try and squeeze a short ride in here or there.

Rich packing the support vehicle

Packing up the Hammer Gel

On first take, the idea of bicycling across the country seems so simple. After all, what else do you need besides a bike and maybe someone to follow behind to provide support? Well, as is true of so many things, the details are what snags ya. I wrote back in April of the challenge of deciding what we need to bring along. Since then, we’ve pretty much made all of those decisions and ordered nearly everything we’ll need for the trip. We are still waiting on our spare wheels, but nearly all our other spare parts, misc. equipment, and on-the-bike nutrition are now all ready to go. Here’s a picture of our current inventory:

In addition to our luggage, we’ve got to squeeze
this in the support vehicle. Doable right?

One of the challenges I have had this spring is trying to determine, given a limited budget, the appropriate amount of spare parts and equipment that we will need on route when/if things go wrong or when equipment (e.g., tires, chains) naturally wears out. With four of us riding, there are just so many variables.

How many flat tires should we plan on? Will a puncture ruin just the tube or the tire as well? Consider the likely scenario of one of us hitting a pothole somewhere along the way. Will we just need to true the wheel? Or will we need to fix broken spokes as well? Or could the rim break and permanently ruin the wheel? Will we need to replace brake pads? What about a spare chain? You get the idea.

Just how many of these nasty things are
we going to have over 2,500 miles?

For bicycle tours that have an open or flexible schedule, these issues are a little easier to deal with—simply take a spare tire/ tube, a couple spokes, and a spare chain, and for anything more serious, simply find the nearest bicycle store on route and let them fix it. However, because we have a fixed 28-day schedule with several events already planned along the way, we have little or no margin for error. If we assume nothing is going to go wrong, then we could find ourselves off the the bike, looking desperately for a bike store in the middle of the Arizona desert or else spending a fortune on an overnight Fedex shipment of a new part. But at the same time, we can’t take along everything nor could we afford accounting for every eventuality.

Perhaps another apparent victim of Rt. 62 West
(did I mention it is the worst road in the history of western civilization?)

I am relying on my experience from my two cross-country bicycle tours earlier in my life, advice from other bicyclists, and long hours of research on the web. But in the end, deciding on equipment to bring along is proving to be an exercise of weighing pocketbook concerns along side scenario management—and praying for wisdom each step of the way.