March 2017 Update

Since our last post we've moved from the Bond Hotel and are very fortunate to once again be back at Jim & Patti Stevenson's house.  Their hospitality has been awesome.  It has helped Alea's recovery, it has helped our finances immensely, and Jim's help and tools are making it possible to optimize things for our coming return to the road.  We can't thank them enough for all that they have done for us!

Alea's recovery is going well.  She is able to be more active, and even went for a very short bike ride yesterday.  She will be 3 months post-surgery just before we head out again around the first of May.  It will likely be a while after that before she is fully recovered, but she should initially be able to cover at least some of the easier stretches on our planned route for 2017.

One change to our blog is that the map above, will be a permanent fixture.  Instead of having a map that shows our intended route and more-or-less daily progress along it, we will be updating the above map more-or-less state to state, or every couple of weeks or so.

Speaking of our planned route, we've added a link at the right to a page that contains screenshots of maps with an approximation of where we will be in 2017.  There are five main factors that have shaped this year's route: 

1. A planned rendezvous in Minnesota in late July with Alea's siblings, 
2. A desire to visit with friends and family in the Puget Sound area in late August - early September, 
3. A desire to bicycle tour for a few days or so in September with Travis Hodgdon (whom I had first met touring in 1985), 
4. A desire to rendezvous with Alea's friend Pat Mahan somewhere near Pennsylvania, and 
5. A desire to spend another winter near Alea's siblings and friends in Florida.

And there are many other factors that have gone into planning the route, not the least of which is to connect with segments of routes that we have already completed.

Our current focus is on further refining the configuration of our van, as this is the first time since we started out on the road where we have full access to all the tools necessary to accomplish everything that we would like to do.  We will be sharing all of those changes in April, when we will likely begin blogging a bit more frequently as our departure date nears.