If you can’t tell in the picture that is me sitting in my lawn chair with a bag of ice on my knee.  I woke up in the middle of the night with a killer knee ache, and decided I better not ride my bike until the swelling went down. Been icing it all day and taking Aleve, and I am planning on biking tomorrow. I will have to put a note beside this trip saying I didn’t bicycle all the miles. We tied my trike to the back of the camper and we are also pulling a trailer, and when Mary Ann pulled out of the camp ground the trailer swung around and bent the handle on my bike. Yikes, I thought I was stuck in the pickup with the ladies going to quilting stores for the rest of the trip. When we got to our camping spot in Hope Arizona I went right to work on the trike and got it all fixed up good. They were planning on going to a quilting store today, but I prayed and asked the Lord for mercy and they couldn’t find it!! Thank You Jesus! We have a nice young lady that is riding the same route pull in and Patty invited her to camp with us. She is from Quebec and her accent is so strong I don’t understand much of what she says, but she has bicycled just about everywhere in the world. Mongolia, China, Tibet, Vietnam, Laos, Combodia, Europe, lots of great stories. Her goal is to get to St Augustine about the same time as us so we should see her some more. I think Patty is going to adopt her.

we started this morning  in El Centro and are in Palo Verda. An 82 mile ride with some major hill climbing but not as bad as yesterday for hills. It was super hot, I think I heard that it hit  90 degrees and supposed to be hotter tomorrow. I was 8 miles from camp and the ladies came with the pickup to check on me with one hour of daylight left. I could have made it, but I was so tired I let them talk me into loading the trike on the truck, tho they didn’t have to talk very hard to convince me😀 Tomorrow we have 72 miles some major hill climbing and some heat. Boy, I don’t want to not make it three days in a row, that would be major wimpy. All of us are having significant problems with muscle cramps, especially in the middle of the night. John has us drinking Quinine water!! I am drinking gallons of Gator Aid. I took lots of pictures today but the cell service and WiFi are super weak and wouldn’t send the pictures. My Trike is working good now. Very comfortable, no butt pain, neck pain, hand pain, or shoulder pain as last year. Doesn’t go as fast as a regular bike but I will take comfort over speed any day. Rode on a 15 mile section today where there was no shoulder so I have to ride my Trike in the road, and in the 15 miles I got 5 major horn honks. I am not sure what people expect me to do, but I just smiled and waved. When the ladies drove past me I didn’t recognize the pickup but when they pulled off in front of me I thought,”Oh great, someone is going to yell at me” ! I rode right on by, and Patty yelled at me, and I thought, ” I think I know that lady”

the goal today was 87 miles, I made it 50 and then called the ladies to come pick me. It was 4 pm and I knew I wasn’t going to make 37 more before it got dark. It was a tough day of biking with lots of hills, long, long climbs of 6%. John and Richard were way ahead of me but they ran out of daylight as well. We picked them up on the back to camp. On the way through El Cerrito where we are tonight someone came up with the great idea of going to a restaurant for dinner. It was unanimous, and it was a buffet where we went so I got really well fed!. This a very short blog, but I am so sleepy I can’t keep my eyes open.

Well we arrived with much bad traffic, but I guess that is the name of the game in Southern California. I started out the day riding in the camper because it is so crowded in the pickup with 6 adults crammed there all day. That was a bad idea. Every bump we hit was amplified many times over in that camper and I bounced all over, and the nice quite reading I was planning didn’t happen.  I moved back in at the next stop. We are now camped in “Campland on the Bay” which is about 5 miles from our official starting place so instead of our planned 42 mile first day it will be 47 miles. Spent most of the evening putting my trike back together and getting everything tuned up,  getting  water bottles located and filled, camera batteries charged, maps located and put in my saddlebags, trail mix put in baggies and put in saddle bags as well, and all my biking cloths located and stacked neatly at the foot of my sleeping bag. I also spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out how to attach my can of pepper spray for dogs where I would have easy access to it and be able to use it quickly. One of the draw backs with a recumbent trike is I will be eye ball height with dogs who decide I need bitten. It is about 70 degrees at 8’pm and supposed to be nice and sunny tomorrow. We will be biking in lots of traffic for the first 20 miles tomorrow as we go through San Diego and we will go from sea level to 4,200 feet in 40 miles so it will be a fun day starting out.  Well, I will chat with you tomorrow and tell you all about the awesome first day and it’s adventures.

Drove from Jefferson to Stockton, California today and sleeping in our tent tonight. Tomorrow we will make it to San Diego and get all ready for the big start on Sunday. I have my trike almost all dismantled and on the top of the camper so that will be the main project tomorrow when we get to where we are camping. I hope I can get it all back together right!! Laying in my tent tonight thinking of the various adventures in my life and what makes them an adventure as opposed to just an interesting experience.  A key part is the element of risk and danger involved. Many people as they made comments to me as we were getting ready to leave was, “be safe”. My thought is, being safe is boring, and if I wanted to be safe I would stay home.  Our culture is in the ultra safe mode with every imaginable safety devise and percaution on cars and everything we buy. I think one reason that these “off the grid” television shows are so popular is people as a whole would like a lot more adventure and risk in their life, but are afraid to make choices that would bring it.  A few near death experiences is really what makes a trip an adventure. We will see if we have any.

Well , it finally came, the night before we leave on our 3,700 mile bicycle trip.  Several years ago when my brother and I did a bicycle trip to Fairbanks , Alaska I forgot my bicycle shoes and had to go to a bike shop to buy a new pair before I could ride,  we hauled everything over to to Klindtworth’s to pack into the camper today. The rest of today I kept racking my brain for what I have forgotten.  I can’t think of anything but I will still wake up ten times tonight trying to remember what I am not remembering.  One of the best learning tools and skills is writing down what was done right and what was done wrong after an event and then reviewing it before the next similar event.  Three  problems though, I forget to write stuff down or I forget where I wrote it, or I forget to read it. Oh well, if there weren’t a bunch of problems life would get boring. I bought our return trip airplane tickets last night. We are due to arrive in St Augustine April 23rd so I bought our tickets to leave on the 26th, just in case we are a couple days late. One of the disciplines that the early church fathers practiced was solitude for the purpose of personal reflection in order to grow. One of my goals for these bicycle trips is to be all by myself most of the day as I ride and be able to think, reflect, confess, commit, and make goals. Maybe my memory will improve as well.

Rode 20 miles today on my recumbent trike with John Smith and Richard Klindtworth the guys going on the bicycle trip to Florida with me. The trip out to Talbot and back went great. The trike I built worked flawlessly and it was a fun day anticipating leaving on our trip Friday morning. Puttered around tonight getting things rounded up, and then around 7:30 tonight I just crashed.  I totally ran out of gas and as I sit writing this blog at 9:30 pm I am in a bit of a stupor trying to think with enough clarity so that this doesn’t sound like nonsense. I thought I was in pretty good shape from riding my stationary bike an hour each day, but I guess not as good as I hoped. Oh well, last year I hadn’t exercised, or road much at all before we took off for Portland, Maine so the first two weeks was my conditioning. The first two weeks were miserable, but I did get in shape and get tough also.  We will just do it again.

There is something very refreshing after months of rain and clouds to have a day like today where the sun is shining and it is so bright outside. I can see why people go to Arizona during the winter months. But I think that it is the contrast that brings the real joy, not just the sunshine. Without the contrast of the dreary the bright will become ordinary and unappreciated.  Joy wouldn’t really be joy without sadness. Heaven wouldn’t really be that great if we didn’t have something that made it great, this life with all of its trials and pain.  I am longing for my new life with my new body with God in His presence.  The  more I ache and hurt the more I long and the more beautiful it will be when I get there.  I could just wait passively for that day to get here, but I think instead I will work as hard as I can and do as much as I can so that when I enter glory I do so with a character that is like Jesus’s and when I see Him He gives me great rewards for doing His work. I think it is supposed to be a sunny day tomorrow as well, super.

This weekend I preached a sermon on the power of turning the other cheek instead of retaliating, getting angry, bitter, or defending ourselves when our rights are violated, and trusting God, because He promises to exalt us if we humble ourselves.  The sermon basically was the blog I wrote about a week ago. It isn’t a topic of preaching that would be voted most popular. Today I got three different responses from people who put the principles of the sermon into practice, and they shared their stories of how God worked and blessed. This concept is so opposite of our culture today  and also opposite our natural response to being treated poorly that very few live the principles and experience God exalting and honoring them and doing great things through their life. Jesus said, If you want to follow Me you must deny yourself and pick up your cross daily. It was so cool to read those stories today, and to say to myself, “Thank You Lord, You are faithful and good”.

Here is the route for our bicycle trip.  The stars are where we are camping.