It is 9:00 pm Wednesday night and we have our bicycles in the trailer tied down well, with all our food, cloths, sleeping bags etc packed in the Motorhome. Tomorrow morning at 6:00 am five of us are taking off on a one month adventure, with a sixth person joining us in one week. Tomorrow we will drive to a campground just a few miles from the Canadian border, sleep there overnight and then Friday morning, bright and early, we will hop on our bicycles and pedal South. Our destination is the Mexican border and we will ride most of the trip on Highway 101 and Highway 1 in California. The total trip is approximately 2000 miles and we will average about 70 miles per day and be home on May 23rd just in time for me to preach on the 24th and 25th at JBC.

In the past years of doing these trips we have mostly camped in tents, but this year we are going to stay in the Motorhome every night. We have every day mapped out, with each days map on our cell phones with verbal instructions at all of the turns. The mapping program also shows us a silhouette of each days ride with expected elevation climbs and descents. The campsights are all reserved, and they all have hot showers! We usually average 10 to 14 mph and take a butt break every five miles.

Breakfast for me will be a bowl of granola ceral with oat milk on it with two cups of coffee. We snack along the way on dried fruit, nuts, energy bars, and cookies. Sometimes we will stop for lunch, usually at a “Sub Sandwich” place that happens to be at the right place at the right time. Dinner for me is usually a can of stew, pork and beans, or something similar with a can of vegetables, usually beans, and then for a bedtime snack we will eat some microwave popcorn. I drink a lot of water and some sort of electrolyte sports drink all day long.

This is our tenth long distance bicycle trip. We have done two trips to Fairbanks, Alaska, three coast to coast trips, the northern route, Southern, and one through the middle of the United States, each of those was about 4,000 miles. We did a trip to the Grand Canyon, then up to Yellowston, and then home which was close to 4,000 miles. We did one around the State of Oregon and a number of others that started at home and went out to Montana and around and back home. At the beginning of everyone of the last five trips I have assumed that this is probably the last one of these that I have in my old body. We will see how I feel at the end of one month, usually I feel 20 years younger, that is why I keep doing these darn torture trips.