The Night Before

It’s Thursday night at 7pm.  I am just getting home from work and done with dinner.  I’ve procrastinated, but have to get ready to leave in the morning.  Over the past few weeks a lot of the planning has fallen by the wayside.  Last year the major effort went into planning the route, nutrition, gear, etc. just to complete the trip.  This year I put so much focus into the WBR fundraising that a lot of the planning, which is so crucial, got pushed to the last minute.  So now it’s late in the evening and I have to start gathering everything together.

10 days worth of nutrition

Earlier in the week, I’d taken the bike in for a final tune up and installed brand new tires on the front and back.  I put on the Arkel Rando Rack for my trunk bag and packed everything else into a blue plastic bin.  Heather was going to drive up for the first few nights so I put spare parts, nutrition, and extra clothes in the bin which she could carry in the car.  I attached a GoPro camera to the front handlebars so I could take some movies and pictures from the bike.  My plan was to create a stop motion video of all the days stitched together.  It was going to be a lot of extra work managing batteries, memory cards, etc. but hopefully it would be worth it.  Finally I put on a little top tube bag for the cellphone and nutrition during the day.

The bike loaded up and ready to go

Part of the lack of planning came into play when I realized my new cell phone wouldn’t fit in the bag.  I was ticked that I hadn’t thought of that beforehand but it was too late to do anything about it now.  I tried cramming it in there and it barely fit.  The bag is handy because it's easily accessible right in front of me without having to reach back to the pockets.  However, when out of the saddle during a climb my knees kept hitting it because it kept falling to the side annoyingly.  Tomorrow was definitely going to be a trial run.

Nutrition for Day 1

Last but not least I put on my new Garmin computer.  This was the new 810 model and the next step up from the 705 I used last year.  The difference was the 810 had the ability to Live Track via Bluetooth connection to my cellphone.  This was a nice feature because Heather or anyone following me could log in and find my GPS location live and drive right to me if there was a problem.  The old 705 was also showing a very short battery life and the reliability was questionable since the unit would randomly turn off for no apparent reason.  With this big journey I didn’t want to have any issues which would leave me stranded.  The only problem was that I had literally picked it up the night before so I had very little experience working it.  Another mistake, but no time to dwell on that now.

Contents of my trunk bag: Tubes, patch kit, rain coat, sunscreen, laundry detergent, pump, CO2, shorts, t-shirt, rag, multi-tool, chamois creme

By 10pm I was pretty much ready to go and as I stared at the size of my pack and simplicity of the setup I couldn’t help but feel a little nervous about the enormous challenge that was to come. Part of this simplicity is the beauty of it all… the fact that a simple machine powered by the human body and travel over 1,000 miles is pretty amazing.  But it was not going to be easy.

With everything set and ready to go for the morning I went to sleep unsure of what was to come.