So what am I doing? I am embarking on a 1000 mile bike ride this summer and I thought it would be fun to write about it and share my experiences both in the planning as well as the ride itself. I will be leaving with my good friend Greg sometime in early July after the 4th. I'm not a camper so the ride started as a motel to motel trip. Then my wonderful wife Cheryl volunteered to follow us in our RV. How great is that!
I live in Beaverton Oregon and I wanted to make the trip a destination trip versus a big circle. My wife's sister Becki lives near Folsom CA so we thought that would be a fun place to ride to. We could even ride across t.he Golden Gate Bridge! So I got on line and found the Adventure Cycling Association website. This is a terrific group and their website is FULL of valuable information. Looking at the different routes I stated to gravitate towards the Pacific Coast route and even ordered the maps. As time went on, I decided that I am already familiar with the northern Oregon Coast and think the traffic might be bad so we started looking at other routes.
Some of our family will be at Sunriver near July 8 so we are considering starting from there and heading toward Crater Lake, then heading west to the Redwoods then on down to San Francisco. It's been fun planning the route since I really have no constraints. My only requirement is that I ride 1000 miles. At the same time, I do want a meaningful ride seeing many beautiful parts of the Northwest.
I took some time yesterday to actually map out the details (turn by turn) from Sunriver to San Francisco. I smiled as I mapped the route and imagined all the different emotions we will feel along the way. Wonder as we ride along the beautiful scenery, frustration as we get a flat 10 miles into the days ride or satisfaction as we pull into camp at the end do a daily ride. When I finished the route I was surprised to see that it only added up to 680 miles!!!! Seriously? All that way and I still need to come up with another 320 miles. OMG.
