Here I come.
Now that’s the way I like it. Flight boards around quarter of four.
And the answer is…
…Halifax!
Tomorrow I’ll fly to Halifax, Nova Scotia, arriving just after midnight. I’ll hang around in the airport until about five in the morning when the buses start to run. At that time I’ll catch one and travel on to my lodgings for the next few days- an unoccupied (for the summer) dorm room at Mt. St. Vincent University. For $22 a night it was a great deal. I will then spend my time sightseeing in Halifax until my bicycle arrives on Friday.
Well, it is Fedex Ground
I’ll assemble the bike Friday evening and the next morning I’ll start riding as far south as I can go by the third week or so of October.
Key West, here I come. A RidewithGPS map link will follow shortly.
My SAG Team
While this is a solo bike trip, in that I’ll be riding alone and do not have a support vehicle traveling with me, I do have a SAG (support and gear) crew helping me along the road from home in Alaska about 5,000 miles/8,000 km away.
My wife Heather and her mom Frankie are there for me every day over the phone and by text and email with words of encouragement, advice and news from Alaska. They are taking care of the things at home that I can’t while I’m gone and are there when I need things mailed to me, like refills of meds, along the way. Frankie came all the way up from her home in Tennessee to stay with Heather and do this with her.
Heather and Frankie make the best support crew I could ask for and I know I owe each a great deal for their willingness to be a big part of my b2b trip.
How do I…
…find a place on my bike to put my Quad-Lock [linkie] iPhone mount when there is no regular tubular surface on the handlebars or stem?
I plan to use my iPhone 6 Plus as a cycling computer during my ride. To this and I have bought one of those nifty Quad-Lock cases which allows the phone to be securely mounted to a corresponding Quad-Lock handlebar mount. You just simply position the phone over the mount 45° from the up-and-down or sideways position, press, and twist it into place. There is a locking system on the mount that makes it virtually impossible for the phone to come off during a ride. It is the best handlebar mounting system for a smart phone that I have seen, and I think I looked at most of them.
So after thinking about it for a while I went out and bought a piece of 1 inch PVC pipe, which I trimmed to about 6 inches long. I attached the Quad-Lock mount to it with two zip ties. Then I drilled two sets of holes on the other side of the pipe from the mount the corresponded to the spacing of the supports for my Ortlieb handlebar bag. I inserted two more zip ties into the holes, leaving me with this.
Attaching those zip ties to the handlebar bag supports fixed my new Quad-Lock mount bar quite securely.
So now I have an iPhone dashboard for my bike!
Garden gnomes gone wrong
I think I know how he feels.
Which way did it go…?
Well, that’s not a Trek bike in that box in any event.
So, oh momma, can this really be the end?
Is it really all over? Am I headed back to Alaska? After all that prep, am I done after only riding 60 miles/105 km?
Or am I headed for the next level? Just keep in mind what Treebeard said (in the movie at least):
I always like going South; somehow it feels like going downhill.
So, wherever you go, there you are. And we’ll see where we are in just a few days.
David Edgren
Heh!
…’em if you got ’em.
I do not think that sign means what you think it means.
Problem solved!
I don’t see my sister Sue (and the rest of her family- great folks all) enough- about once every ten years on average after we went our separate ways on reaching adulthood. She is the only other person in my life besides my mom (R.I.P. – hi mom! Miss ‘ya!) who has been conferred the privilege of calling me “Dave” without incurring an annoyed look.
So Sue put her mind to helping me deal with the Florida heat…
If you have a favorite brother or sister, call them up right now and tell them how special that they are to you. I know mine is.
Weigh-In #5 – It must have been the pizza
Well, sometimes you just can’t win. After eating a 1,500 calorie a day low-carb, no fat, no salt, no fun diet in the hospital for much of four days this past week, I gained weight.
I’m up five pounds since last Monday. I had on street clothes this time while on the scale- a pound extra, maybe- but I’d really hoped to make it in to the 330s. Maybe this scale, which was in the ER at Bayfront Hospital in Spring Hill, Florida, was off by a bit. Maybe not.
But next week we’ll do it again, and see.
b2bbiketrip.com - A 2019 bike trip blog 