Entry 3 - Off We Go!

Tonight's entry comes to you from just west of Nashville, Tennessee, where our rider group has come together for the first time.  Three of us loaded up four bikes late this morning and headed down US-41 (I am a sucker for U.S. Routes rather than interstates; it's the Real America and all that), and Matt flew in from Bend, Oregon, via Seattle, starting at 6:09 this morning.  After packing 9000 things into our support van, I struggle to understand how people ride with just what they can carry.  Every inch of space is taken, and then some.

It rained like hell for parts of the drive, but all of us arrived without incident.  That's a good start.  Our family tradition is to start a long road trip with Willie Nelson's "On the Road Again;" it was a fine way to roll out.

Packing yesterday was an exercise in the ridiculous: it was seemingly infinite stops and starts, with pieces scattered everywhere.  I would remember stuff, and then forget it, and then remember it again as the day moved on.  At 9:00 p.m., when I was contemplating bedtime, I realized that I needed to do a load of laundry or I'd be well short on socks and bike shorts.  Sitcoms use the "dopey, bumbling husband and in-control wife" trope to the point that it is nauseating, but doing my own packing for a long trip made me realize just how good Brigid is at this stuff and how much I rely on her.  (Thank you, dear.)  Running around like an idiot all day also made both of us impatient and crabby; I suspect that a week away will be some welcome quiet for her.  And fairly so.

On our ride down here, we covered a number of critically important topics: is Danville, Illinois somehow connected to the pretzel industry? (no, it seems not), where does I-74 begin? (Davenport, Iowa), how old was James K. Polk when he died? (53, only 3 months after he left office), and stuff even more mundane and idiotic than that if you can believe it.

Also on the way down, I tried to convince Brandon and Mike that Matt (who they have never met before tonight) was a hardcore Donald Trump guy, and believed that Mr. Trump was actually a genius who was just acting so ridiculous and petulant so that he could get elected, after which point he'd show his true self and be an excellent and principled president.  I am pretty sure I had them convinced, but then as soon as Matt met them he gave all of my hard work away.  I think partly he couldn't keep a straight face and partly he didn't want to even pretend that was the case.

Tomorrow morning we hit the road for Natchez, which will mark the starting point of the ride.  Our best deal for hotels was at a place with an attached casino, so if one of us gets hot at the craps table maybe the ride will be over before it even starts.

Entry 2 - Everything You Never Wanted to Know About the Trip

I hope that this blog will be interesting for friends and family who want to follow along on our trip (or maybe just want to make sure that we haven't crashed or murdered each other yet).  But I also hope that future adventurers may find it - hello, adventurer, if that is you! - and use our experience to guide their trip planning.

So if you are our friends or family, please pardon some logistical stuff.  If you are a future adventurer, dig in.

1.  Support vehicle vs. panniers.  Our first big decision was whether we should try to do the whole trip with just the gear we could pack on our bikes or whether to bring along a support vehicle.  

A couple of summers ago when we drove out to Glacier National Park, on U.S. Route 2 we frequently encountered touring cyclists loaded down with stuff and poking along.  It looked pretty romantic: these guys were fully responsible for themselves.  They carried everything they needed, and there was something beautiful about the way they hung their gear so ornately from their bikes.  But it also looked pretty grimy, and heavy, and slow, and as I considered our ride I imagined wearing yesterday's underwear inside out and eating a smushed up PowerBar for lunch each day.  No thanks.

So we will have my Honda Odyssey as a support vehicle along the way, loaded down with food and bike gear and chargers and a bunch of stuff that we don't really need but have convinced ourselves to bring anyway.  Our four riders will take turns driving, taking a day and a half off across the six riding days.  (For those of you who may be compelled to point out that because we'll have driving shifts we will not be riding the full 444 miles, I invite you to get your butt out there and see how you do...)

2.  Direction of travel and itinerary.  Our second big decision was whether to ride the Trace from north to south or vice versa.  Anecdotal Googling suggested that past riders were divided evenly between the two choices, so it came down to ease of logistics for us.  We decided to go south to north, because our rider Matthew is from Oregon and Nashville was the most practical place to fly in and out.  Because we don't know how much schedule flexibility we'll need, it makes sense to work our way toward Nashville rather than finishing the ride and having to immediately drive our buddy 500 miles to catch a flight.  

Our ride will (hopefully) look like this:

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Day 1 - 76 miles from Natchez to Raymond, Mississippi (Milepost 76)

Day 2 - 84 miles from Raymond to Kosciusko, Mississippi (Milepost 160, 2-day total 160, average 80)

Day 3 - 70 miles from Kosciusko to Houston, Mississippi (Milepost 230, 2-day total 154, average 77)

Day 4 - 72 miles from Houston to Belmont, Mississippi (Milepost 302, 2-day total 142, average 76)

Day 5 - 52 miles from Belmont, Mississippi to Collinwood, Tennessee (Milepost 354, 2-day total 124, average 71)

Day 6 - 90 miles from Collinwood to Nashville, Tennessee (Milepost 444, 2-day total 142, average 74)

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

From what I can tell, the ride is relatively flat for the first 350 miles, and then gets hilly when you get into Tennessee.  So 90 miles on the last day may be a really stupid idea.  If we feel good at mile 354, maybe we'll add some to day 5 so that we can subtract some from day 6.  (Tune in and find out!)

3.  Food.

Because we have a support vehicle, we have the luxury of bringing along pretty much whatever we want.  So this week I made a trip to Aldi and went a little nuts.  Here's what we have (so far) for the ride:

- 72 bottles of Gatorade (and a can of powder just in case)
- 2 giant, refillable water jugs
- a case of beer (to get us started; we hope to replenish with local stuff when we get down there)
- 2 cases of Coke (my cyclist neighbor Marc says this is the best lunchtime drink and will taste like magic)
- 8 boxes of granola bars
- 2 mega boxes of fruit snacks
- 2 giant jars of peanut butter and 2 of jelly
- 4 cans of Pringles
- 4 bags of pretzels
- 2 big bags of trail mix
- 3 bags of apples
- 1 bag of clementines
- 1 bag of Fig Bars and 1box of Vanilla Wafers, for dessert

You can only ride as far as your fuel will take you, so we are doing what we can to make sure we won't run out of gas.  Combined with a big Southern breakfast each morning and a proper dinner each night, we should be good to go.

4.  Bike gear.

My bike is a 2015 Giant Defy 1, which is not terribly fancy but which I love dearly.  For the ride, the only real change that I made to it was a Brooks Cambium saddle, to keep my butt happy.  I got the bike from Spokes in my hometown of Wheaton, which is a great shop with nice, really-smart-but-never-bike-snobby people.  I had them tune it up this week so it is ready to go.

Other than a pump and helmets and gloves and all of the standard stuff you need to ride, here's the gear we plan to bring along and hope we never need:

- 8 tubes
- 6 tires
- 8 CO2 shots
- a backup wheelset (hey, you never know)
- our best collection of bike tools
- a traveling, foldable repair stand

5.  Tech gear.

So that we can stay connected to each other (and to the outside world) and to document/measure the trip, we'll also have a silly assortment of tech gear.

- a Garmin Edge 1000 bike GPS and Varia tail light/radar
- laptops
- a set of TalkAbout two-way radios (in case cell coverage fails us)
- a 10-usb charger (to fill up our gadgets each night for the next day's ride)
- 2 GoPros
- 2 external battery packs for during-the-day (or over lunch) charging
- a zillion cables and batteries

Like other aspects of the trip, I am positive that there will be stuff that I think is crucial right now that we will never touch.  And I am equally positive that at mile 2 we will realize we forgot something really basic.

6.  Super-cool jerseys.

My friend Jeremy Huggins is an excellent graphic designer, so I commissioned him to make a neat jersey for our trip.  Jeremy is really good at doing all of the work but making you feel like some of it was your idea, so here is what "we" came up with:

I had them printed up by Pactimo, who was easy to work with and makes them in batches as small as 5.  Look for the real-life version in Day 1 pictures (hopefully.)

With all of that planning behind us, the next thing to do is actually get going.  Hopefully we've got what we need.

Entry 1 - Introduction to the Ride

If I do this right, this blog will live for just over a week.  I hope that it will cover the 444 miles that three friends and I are riding on the Natchez Trace Parkway, from Sunday October 2 to Friday October 7, 2016.  

I was inspired to organize the trip when I read this beautiful description of the ride by journalist Andrea Sachs in the Washington Post.  Her writing stirred something in my belly and I have been anticipating the trip ever since.

When we had a group of 4 riders, Randy Fought’s excellent NatchezTraceTravel.com website made the actual planning pretty easy.  Randy is – like most of the people I have talked with as part of this process – exceedingly polite and welcoming and genuinely interested in sharing this part of the country with others.  I am grateful for the resource that he has created.

I have never done a single ride over 65 miles, much less 6 days of 74 miles each.  So maybe when each day is through I will choose beers and Advil and bed over travel blogging.  But let’s find out.