Bikes, Books, and GPS

Waiting always is the hardest part. Most of the bike parts have come in, but some parts we are still waiting on. The most significant is Spring. But that is promised – as highs are finally scheduled to be in the upper 30’s in the near future with lower 40’s not too far off. We are hoping that the “in like a lion, out like a lamb” adage holds true as we got 8” of snow on March 1.

Other than the weather we are waiting on rear hubs and my frame. The frame is built, but has to be shipped from where ever in the Far East the build the Long Haul Truckers so it will be about 3-5 weeks until it gets here. We ordered different rear hubs that will cost a bit more today, so we should be able to get Keith’s bike built up this week. I’ll ride by Trek until my bike gets here. It still should leave enough time for shake down rides before we have to leave for the tour.

Most of our other equipment has been purchased: tents, panniers, racks, fenders, stoves, first aid kit, and more. Now we are just itching to ride.
In the mean time we are doing couch touring by reading together the adventures of John Seigel Boettner, his wife, and five school children ages 12-13, in the book, “Hey Mom, Can I Ride My Bike Across America?” We got it from Adventure Cycling, and it’s a great read. I highly recommend it to inspire young people that they can ride long distances. Quite amusing as well! Well worth the read.

Another item we purchased that has become a big hit is a GPS unit. We got a Garmin GPS 60. Keith was introduced to Geocaching last summer at the Faith on Fire Camporee and we have really enjoyed it. Geocaching is a high tech treasure hunt game using GPS coordinates and clues. We will build our training rides around finding caches. To learn more about Geocaching, “the sport where you are the search engine,” visit GeoCaching.com. This, along with DeLorme’s TopoUSA software will enable us to produce maps of our travels. We had to do a bit of tweaking to get DeLorme and Gamrin to talk to each other, since DeLorme’s GPS support is not up-to-date, but we found a way to make it work.