Yeah, same here, normally. But if the timing is right, it may work out this year.

Can't wait to see your photos and hear more about the highlights.

My BF from high school's daughter is an artist/entrepreneur in Marfa. She has a successful Airbnb rental. I have a vintage Airstream trailer to deliver to her in May.

*&^% library computer! Jealous of that trip, sounds great and probably hot/sunny. Kind of trip I dream about.

Arrived on Dauphin Island, Alabama late Tuesday afternoon. Yesterday was a planned day off--our first since Austin and I think our fourth overall. We're still here today because it's too windy for the ferry to run and we'd rather wait another day than cycle 50 extra miles (maybe more) around Mobile Bay. Two days off in a row!

The great irony is that we've been wanting a west wind for weeks. Since West Texas, the wind has been consistently in our faces or on our right side, out of the south. Now we have a nice 20 mph west wind that is keeping us pinned down here. There's no justice, I tell you.

Presumably the ferry will run tomorrow and we'll get to the Florida line by mid-day or so. We looked at the final ACA map and were surprised to find that Florida is well over 400 miles wide, which frankly seems a little excessive to me. Three hundred miles would have been plenty.

But the trip is going great. Great sights have been seen, comical mishaps experienced, and grueling days gotten through. I'll post again when I get home.

Sounds awesome! Keep it safe, keep it upright.

Great to hear from you! I was wondering when the next post would occur, and eagerly await the post-ride write up when you're sitting down in front of a familiar computer with no place to ride the next day.

Touring-wind's always in your face, and uphills are 4X longer than downhills. I hope you're keeping notes of some of those stories to share with us!

Lake City, Florida, in the library researching how to get home with our bikes. One-way car rental to Maine from St. Augustine seems so cheap that nothing else makes sense. Plan is to arrive in SA the day after tomorrow. Weather remains great and not too hot. A bit sad about getting done but also sort of eager to be home. More later.

If you're riding down US-90 through Jacksonville's westside, yell when you pass Edgewood Avenue, I'll be about a half a mile from you. Enjoy the balance of your trip, we've had nothing but beautiful weather here.

Jon,

Looking forward to your return to Northern New England and hearing all about your adventure. I was driving south on I-89 earlier this week and a Bike-VT van and trailer passed heading north (to Woodstock, VT, I presume) loaded with at least 20+ bikes on top of both. Of course I thought of you and wondered were you were on your trip. Glad to hear you are safe and well. Now--- be careful DRIVING north on I-95 to make your way home.

Wondering if the rental car companies need to get cars from the warm south to the cold northeast - typical reason why the cost is so low. When we moved from California to Portland, we rented a large SUV - one way was an arm and a leg. Portland to California, we were told, was a lot cheaper.

Two days left - I can understand your sadness. My first bike tour after a two decade hiatus left me feeling the same way. Why does it have to end?

As the airlines like to say, you're about to start the most dangerous part of your trip - driving up I90!

We all expect, as a minimum, a novela to come out of this trip.

All this is all well and good and all, but I don't believe any of it happened. We've seen no pics, no pics at all, at all.

(Get with the program, Jon. )

Okay, guilty as charged. Got back to Cabot at about 1 AM on Monday and am now caught up on sleep.

I didn't take all that many or very good photos, but here are a few of them:

Phil on a 30-mile straightaway near Aguila, Ariz; Phil on the abandoned old road and tunnel we used to bypass the terrifying newer tunnel near Superior, Ariz.; me near Safford, Ariz.; a desert camp on BLM land near Lordsburg, N.M; us at 8,228' Emery Pass in N.M.; taking a break two-thirds of the way through a hot and taxing day on the way to Marfa (the guy in yellow is Engineer Mike, whom we teamed up with for about a week in passing through West Texas); me with a statue of Ray Charles in Greenville, Fla.; and the two of us hitting the Atlantic at Butler Beach, just south of Saint Augustine.

Woo-hoo! Glad to see you're back home safe and sound. When you get rested up a bit, we expect a lot more details!

Really like your "minimalist" kit. I've seen so many bikes with twice or more the load as you carried. Share your list if you have one.

Well done, Jon! (I'm reading this thread form work right now but I will return later and examine the pics and captions more closely later.)

Congratulations Jon! Glad you are back in the Northeast Kingdom safe and sound. Would love to get together with you for coffee or lunch at King Arthur's and pick your brain. Maybe one day after Memorial Day when things slow down a bit at the church.

Okay, you convinced me! That sure looks inviting, especially that desert campsite. You're lookin' pretty thin, like you just finished up a bunch of exercise. Memories for a lifetime, I'm sure.

That was a brilliant campsite--my favorite one of the trip. The stars that night were unbelievable

Yeah, getting enough calories was kind of a challenge--you have to consciously pack in the food, sometimes more than you really feel like eating. I went from 175 to about 170 over the 48 days of actual riding (plus 6 non-riding days).

Sometime in the next day or so I'll post a trip synopsis to go with the pictures. Stand by.

Welcome home, Jon!

Thanks for the pictures. I look forward to the story.

I agree that it's nice to see you carry a small amount of stuff. At one point in my big tour, I mailed stuff back that I wouldn't need.

It was about as minimalist as I could make it, but it was still quite a lot of stuff. Right after I got home I weighed the whole outfit (I'd forgotten to do it before we left) and found that it came to about 33 lbs. total. That includes the panniers, rear trunk bag, all their contents, and the clothing I wore while riding. It doesn't include the Blackburn racks, bottle cages, bottles, or any food or water. Loaded down with 8 quarts of water for the long stretches between towns in West Texas, the load must have been 40 lbs. or a little more.

I don't think I could have reduced that by much, though, since I felt that I needed everything I had and only once needed something that I didn't have, when it turned out that my 8" adjustable wrench didn't open quite wide enough (lacking maybe 2mm) to engage my headset locknut. I had to buy a cheap set of channelocks at a farm-supply store to adjust the headset--fortunately the chrome had already been dinged up by a previous owner.

Anyway, here's what I brought:

In dry bag strapped to front rack--lightweight 20-degree down quilt from Enlightened equipment, lightweight pants with zip-off legs, a medium long-sleeved wool jersey, a super-light down jacket--comparable to a lightweight fleece--and two extra pairs of wool socks. My rain jacket and pants were strapped outside the dry bag.

During the day I wore wool socks, SPD cycling shoes, black long underwear (some kind of high-zoot synthetic stuff), and two pairs of cheapish Nashbar liner shorts under a pair of unlined bike shorts (I found that one pair didn't provide enough padding). I also wore a white cotton dress shirt, usually with a highway-worker safety vest over it. It made me look like a dork, but since I am a dork I didn't really mind. I also wore a bandanna under my helmet, covering my ears and cheeks. As a result I only had to put sunscreen on my nose an cheeks, and never got sunburned at all. I don't like sunscreen but I like sunburn even less.

In right front pannier--lightweight insulated air matress, small MSR canister stove with fuel canister, lightweight nylon hammock (a fabric one, not the mesh type), a headlamp, a one-pint plastic mug, a plastic knife, fork, and spoon, a pack towel, a butane lighter, and a 4-cup aluminum pot with lid, which actually held 6 cups when filled to the brim.The fuel canister, lighter, towel, and headlamp fit into the pot. I usually carried a jar of peanut butter in the mug.

In left front pannier--tent fly (Phil had the tent body and poles), some food items, and wool knit cap, and some light wool gloves which I needed a few times early on, and could have sent home later but didn't. Toothbrush, toothpaste, and a little bottle of Dr. Bronner's soap. ("All-One!")

In trunk bag on back rack--too many tools and spare parts (I'm not going to list them all, but I think they weighed about 5 lbs in aggregate.) Three spare tubes, three tire patch kits. I also carried some food back here, shifting it around to the front left as needed to equalize the side-to-side weight in front. I also carried as many as four additional quarts of water in the trunk back during desert crossings. The trunk bag had a zip-open expansion that was useful for carrying bulky short-term items, like the occasional six-pack or rotisserie chicken (or, once, both).

In a Jandd frame bag on the top tube--more food, mostly for eating during the day (I thought of this bag as my fuel tank, because it goes where a motorcycle gas tank would be), my notebook, pen, and postcards.

In a tiny frame box--reading glasses, phone charger, and a few other small odds and ends. I had a small cheap digital camera in a plastic bag in my hip pocket, along with a Swiss Army knife and folding allen-wrench set

That's pretty much it. I probably could have gotten by with one extra pair of socks instead of two. The hammock weighed a pound and a half and I could have done without it, but it was nice on evenings when there were trees around. Phil's sleeping bag wasn't quite warm enough on the coldest nights, so it was also useful as a supplementary blanket from time to time.

40 lbs max with all that water is still below what most consider an "expedition" load and you did a cross-country tour!

Okay, here's the ride report. I'll try to be brief:

Route and Navigation We followed the Adventure Bicycle Association Southern Tier maps pretty much the whole way. We diverged from the route for maybe 200 miles here and there, mostly because the route they had listed seemed overly indirect and complicated. The ABC maps show only a very narrow slice of territory, so you also need a standard road map if you want to know where you are overall. These are getting hard to find. After trying a lot of gas station/convenience stores, we finally found an Arizona road map that the clerk had a hard time selling us because it lacked a computer code. The manager came out and said "Gosh, we haven't sold one of those in years."

We eventually found that big drugstores like CVS of Walgreens always seem to have maps--often large-print versions--because their customers are geezers like us. "Give me a jumbo box of Depends and that Florida map, my good man."

Total mileage, according to the maps, was 3,060. No idea how far we actually rode, because neither of us had a computer. The trip took 54 days total, of which we actually rode for 48. If I'm doing the math right, we averaged about 63 miles a day, which is coincidentally how old I'll be turning next week.

Bikes I rode my 1981 Miyata 1000, and Phil was on a fairly recent long-wheelbase recumbent made by Rans. Phil was consistently faster than me, although that was probably the rider more than the bike. I completely wore out a chain (I measured 3/16" of elongation over 12" when I got home) but had no real mechanical problems. On the first few big descents I had a bad speed wobble that started at about 15 mph and rapidly got worse. Pressing my knee against the top tube controlled it almost completely, but it was unpleasant. It went away almost completely after I got better about equalizing the weight in the front panniers.

Tires I rode on a new set of 27x1 1/4 Gatorskin Hardshells. Some seem to not like the way they ride, but they seemed fine to me--just like any other tire. I kept the pressure pretty low--60 PSI in back, 50 in front. I got three flats in 3,000+ miles--one from a piece of wire, one from the head of a roofing nail lying on its side, and one from some thorns. After the thorn flat in Arizona, I put on some heavy-duty tubes and never had another flat. The roofing nail left a 5mm cut in the front tire, but I booted it on the inside with a strip of Gorilla Tape and never had a problem.

Phil had a few more flats than I did, and both of his Schwalbe Marathons had major issues. The front one (new at the start of the trip) was defective. It had a big lump that eventually burst--fortunately just a day after he'd picked up a cheap Kenda tire as a replacement. The rear tire, also new, was shedding big chunks of tread by the end of the trip but it was still holding air.

Food In addition to the usual convenience-store junk food, we ate huge numbers of flour tortillas, because they don't break or crumble and are easy to shove into a pannier. We had tea in the morning with tortillas, peanut butter, and bananas, sometimes also splitting a quart of yogurt with granola when we could get it. Tortillas and cheese at midday, with avocados when we could get them. For dinner we usually boiled up something simple--couscous with a small can of chicken, ramen noodles with tuna. A favorite was smoked sausage, rice, and a fresh sweet potato cut into pieces. We were ocassionally resorted to fast food, but not often.

You can make a great high-energy convenience store gorp by crushing a medium-size bag of Ruffles potato chips into small fragments, then mixing in a small bag (maybe 2-3 oz.?) of deluxe mixed nuts and two small individual boxes of raisins. It mixes right in the chip bag. Ambrosia.

Lodging and camping We spent about a dozen nights in cheap motels. We camped the rest of the time, except for a couple of nights spent with friends (one in Silver City, NM, and one in Austin) and a couple of others with Warm Showers hosts. A few of the motel nights were recuperative in nature, but most were because we found ourselves in a developed area with no camping options.

The whole trip was an amazing experience overall. I'm really glad I went. I've been on multi-week mountain trips in the past, but nothing this long. I loved the way the trip developed into its own reality--not an interlude from daily life, but actually becoming daily life. I'm ordinarily a voracious reader, but read nothing for the duration of the trip. My mind got a lot quieter, too--it abandoned all the constant planning and looking ahead it tends to do at home.

I don't know how useful any of that is. I'm happy to answer specific questions if anyone has any.

Ah, the simple life. Get up, and your only job is to go ride your bike a bit down the road!

All the touring I've ever done, typically about a week's trip, I've planned on about 65 miles/day, so your math works out the same. I also have noted that no matter how hard I try, I average 10mph including stops. Any faster means I'm pooped, any slower means I'm stopping too long, which makes it harder to get back on the bike.

The fact that neither of you used a smart phone for maps or directions, and didn't use a cyclometer shows that you really don't need any electronics to do this. Most of us like the crutch of a cyclometer, turn-by-turn directions, texting, phoning, and emailing and believe that it's a necessary part of life. Of course, it isn't, and somehow you made it all the way across the US without it.

Very useful, Jon, very useful!

Sounds great, Jon. I now have a plan for the year I turn 63!

If you don't have to miss work to do it, it's about as cheap as staying home. Not counting travel on the way out (but including travel on the way back), the trip cost us about $25 per day apiece.