Leaving Palmetto

Our two months as the guests of Teri and Carson Robinson is coming to an end, and it will be another two months before we begin our 2016 adventure.  The van is washed and waxed, and we are slowly moving everything back into the camper in preparation of living out of doors once again.

Our backyard for the past two months...

We'll be camping around Florida while we wait for spring to reach the East Coast, probably spending up to a week at a time at various Florida State Parks.  We are hoping to spend each Friday and Saturday with friends or family, as many Florida parks are fully booked on weekends (unless we head quite a ways north).  We plan to spend at least one week exploring Southern Florida and the Everglades, and the rest of the time we'll likely stay in Central and North Central Florida.

We've really enjoyed our time here in Palmetto.  Teri and Carson's generosity has given us a great place to adequately address a number of technical problems with our camper, to host a Christmas get together, to thoroughly clean our camper and van, and to get resupplied for another year on the road.  It's made it possible for us to temporarily expand our menu options and enjoy some foods that aren't very practical using the simple galley of our Camp Inn camper.  

But it is always difficult trying to live partly out of a temporary shelter (even one as nice as this) and partly in the camper.  We've become spoiled on the road by never having to mop a floor, vacuum a carpet or clean a toilet, so we are definitely looking forward to the simplicity of returning to our camper, and hoping we won't have too much cold, wet and/or severe weather to contend with these next two months.  We're also anxious to find an area with roads that better accommodate cyclists, which are currently few and far between in our immediate area.  Our first priority will be to check out State Parks nearest to converted rail trails, so we can safely rebuild some of our endurance before hitting the road again.  We likely will start posting once or twice a week until April, and will post more frequently once we start traveling again.

I was successful yesterday in setting up a Twitterfeed account for the purpose of automatically having my blog posts also appear on my Facebook page.  There is an up to six hour time lag before posts appear on Facebook, as I've set it up to only check for new posts every six hours.

Our plans for next week include visiting our friend Marty Malone in Palm Harbor, attending an informal get together of teardroppers at Tomoka State Park next weekend and spending Super Bowl Sunday with Jean. 

Facebook

Having further optimized our  van and camper configuration for our ongoing tagteaming adventure, and with some time to kill until we begin traveling again in April, we've decided to put some effort into maintaining a Facebook presence.  Primarily we will do that through posting our blogspot posts to Facebook.  I don't pretend to understand Facebook, but we are hoping that, if needed, our nieces can help us muddle through when we see them again in Oviedo, and hope that we may even develop some degree of expertise before we start riding up the East Coast later this spring.

While I've had a Facebook account for some time now, I rarely have logged on to check it out.  So I was a bit surprised today to see all the well wishes from our Miata Club friends and former co-workers back in Boise (I knew they wished us well, I just hadn't realized that they had actually done that through Facebook).  Needless to say, I realize now that we have been missing a lot by not having them in our lives every day.

Being on Facebook should make it easier for folks to keep track of our adventures as we post about them on our blog.  And we are hoping it will likely make it easier for some long lost friends to reconnect as we venture into their neck of the woods.  Or even for friends to rendezvous with us so that we can share some memories by spending some time together on the road.

We were fortunate early this month, when one my impromptu travel companions from my 1985 cross country bicycle trip contacted me.  We are greatly looking forward to seeing him again in June and meeting his family for the first time.  Likewise, I was able to track down another such companion from my 1986 travels in Europe and look forward to passing his way in May and hearing about how his travels went after we parted company and learning a bit about the success that he has derived from his cycling experiences.

We'll likely limit checking Facebook to the times when we have access to free wifi, as we routinely exceed our monthly data plan as it is.  As such, we are far more likely to see and respond to messages than to comments.  But we'll try our best to keep up with things as time allows.  

UPDATE 28 Jan 2016:  I've linked my Facebook  page in this post, and added a link in the column to the right.

2016 Route Maps

For some technical reasons, it was necessary to split our route planning for this year onto more than one map, so we've opted to split the route as follows:

• Spring - The Atlantic Coast, from Florida to Bar Harbor, Maine.  We are hoping to complete that route by mid-June.
• Summer - Maine to Missouri, then to South Central Kentucky and down the Natchez Trace to Natchez, Mississippi.  Our best guess is that we'll be on the Trace some time in September.
• Fall - From Natchez west, at least to Eastern Texas, perhaps as far as San Diego, California.  We're likely to be crossing Texas in October and could reach California in November.

There are links at right for each of these maps, and the current map will also be displayed at the top of this blog.  If we go all the way to San Diego I believe our total mileage for the year would be 9,000 miles or more.

We are planning to return to the Natchez Trace again this fall.  It's not the most interesting ride, but it's probably the safest way of getting through Mississippi to the Sun Belt.  And we will have a very good chance of finding other cyclists to travel with along the Trace, which makes traveling a lot more fun for us.

Our summer leg will allow us to complete the remainder of Adventure Cycling's Northern Tier Route.  From there we'll follow Bicycle Route 66 through Illinois to St. Louis.  Then we'll retrace parts of our 2015 route on our way to Cave In Rock, Illinois.  From there we'll be taking the Trans America Trail to Mammoth Caves, Kentucky.  We'll need to find our own way from there to just south of Nashville, where we jump on the Natchez Trace for 400+ miles.

Our fall leg will allow us to cycle the remaining portion of Adventure Cycling's Southern Tier Route, where we will eventually reach San Diego.  Whether we make it that far in 2016 is largely a timing issue.  If we arrive too late, then snow in the mountain passes in New Mexico could cause us to wait east of the mountains until warmer weather arrives.  And based upon our experience with finding available campsites in Florida, we're also a bit concerned about campsite availability in Southern California during the peak of the snowbird season.

2016 Trip Planning

It's a new year and we have made some welcome upgrades to our van, solved some problems with our camper and we will be anxious to get back on the road once the weather warms up sufficiently.  So now is a good time to layout our plans for 2016.

Upon doing some preliminary research, some of the thoughts and plans that we had made at the end of last year appear to be impractical.  We had hoped to head south again in February and then cross Florida to Ft Lauderdale, where we would then head north on Adventure Cycling's Atlantic Coast route.  But in planning that part of the trip we found that the state parks to the south are already nearly 100% booked for February.  It's certainly possible that not all of those reservations will be used, and we might have luck finding campsites at more expensive private parks, but it's looking as though it wouldn't be much fun cycling that route if finding a place to stay will be a constant worry each day.

We checked state and national campgrounds north of Orlando for the same time period, and it looks as though it will be much easier to find camping sites there, though weekends can sometimes be challenging.  That makes some sense, as when we were heading south the flora changed just south of Orlando, when we started seeing citrus groves and a lot more flowering shrubs - it would seem to be the point at which the chance of frost drops considerably.  So we'll likely pick a spot north of Orlando for our departure point for our 2016 adventures, quite possibly Tomoka State Park.  Between now and then, if we have trouble getting a campsite, then when necessary our fallback plan will be to stay with Alea's sister Jean for a night or two.

We've also done some preliminary planning for establishing our likely departure date.  It's looking as though the initial leg of our planned route will be around 2,300 miles to Bar Harbor, Maine.  If we set a goal pace of 300 miles per week (a bit more than 40 miles per day), it would take us less than eight weeks to cover the distance.  Maine generally doesn't start warming up until June, so that means a departure date around the first of April will make the most sense for us.  (We could leave a bit earlier by reducing our planned mileage for the first weeks of travel.  For instance, we could leave a week earlier if we set a goal of only 200 miles per week for the first three weeks on the road.)  

So it is looking as though we'll be heading out again in late March or early April.  Leaving any sooner and we are more likely to find that we would reach some areas before local campgrounds open for the season.  

The next leg of the trip is to cut more or less diagonally across the U.S.  We're thinking we'll likely get to the end of the Natchez Trace by mid-September, which would put us on a pace to reach San Diego in early November.  But a fallback to that plan, if we get there later in the year, would be to find someplace to winter in Texas, with the thought of getting to the West Coast in the early spring of 2017.

So our initial target is to make Maine by early June.  Then, after spending the summer in the Midwest, it is possible that we could jump on the Natchez Trace by as late as mid-October or so.  If we get there that late, then we'll likely winter in Texas.  If we get there by mid-September we'll definitely continue on to California.  If we arrive on the Trace between those dates, we'll have to make a choice of whether to speed up to get through the passes in time, or slow down in anticipation of wintering in Texas.

That gives us a lot of flexibility about the pace we set during the summer.  If we plunk along at our 300 mile per week pace we should end up in Louisiana by mid-September, which would put us on track to get to San Diego at a time when the weather window is pretty optimal (before the passes freeze up in New Mexico, and after the heat in the Desert Southwest has tapered off). 

I'm currently in the process of mapping out our intended route from Florida to Maine to California, which will be reflected on the map at the top of our blog.  Our route will be shown by YELLOW DOTS and each night we intend to add the location of our campground with a RED STAR.  Which brings up an interesting point about our daily logistics.

First, we will no longer maintain our subscription to our SPOT Gen 3 GPS messaging device.  It was great for reducing our anxiety when we started traveling, but we don't feel it is all that necessary any longer.  So the van driver will no longer will have a means of seeing approximately where the bike rider is at any given time.

Second, last year we made a duplicate copy of our Adventure Cycling maps so that the bike rider had the original map and the van driver had a notebook full of copies (which took a lot of time to produce) - so that we both knew our planned route for the day.  This year's route is about twice as long as last year's, so making another full copy of all those maps is impractical (and buying a duplicate set would set us back well over $200!), and we no longer have the tools to make the copies.  

Which is why we've mapped our planned route in detail on a Google Maps page.  We should have internet coverage most everywhere we travel this year, so the van driver will use that map for each day's driving.  Just to be safe, whenever she drives Alea also plans to write out a narrative of that day's route from our Adventure Cycling map (I'll likely do that in areas where our Mi-Fi reception could be iffy and there are lots of twists and turns - mainly in hilly rural areas).

We know this year's route will be challenging in a number of areas.  In the built-up urban areas along the East Coast, the Adventure Cycling route follows bike paths that aren't paralleled by surface roads.  Add in fewer places in such areas for the van driver to park and "breadcrumb" for the bike rider, and there may be some areas that will cause a lot of stress for both of us.  It's good that we are figuring that out now, so that we can begin to strategize how to overcome those uncertainties.