Time to get back on the ROAD!
It's been a long break in Seneca! Actually, I arrived on April 18th and on the 20th I flew back to FLL for Easter and some time with Karim and her family. Happy Easter! We had her family over to the house on Sunday, the 21st. It was a Happy Easter.
On the 23rd, we made it to Alexa's spring concert. That was the event I needed to make it to Seneca for. The concert was excellent as usual although Alexa didn't get to play the flute duet she was practicing with one of her classmates. O well, some things work out. Others don't. Can't go through life worrying about things like that!
I flew back to Seneca on the 24th. Since then I've been chasing the freezer guys to get Joe's freezer fixed. Hopefully the freezer gets fixed today and I get back on the road tomorrow 5/1! During this time I've been doing NOTHING! That's a good thing. I can't think of a better place to do NOTHING - except my house on the lake in Maine. That will come soon enough. I did get to see Avengers:Endgame! Awesome movie! Spoiler alert - don't wait for the "after credit" scene. There isn't one!
This time gave me some time to reassess and work through my route going forward and how I can lighten my load. I've managed to reduce my carry to 2 panniers instead of 4 so you won't see my front panniers any more. As mentioned in an earlier post, I've decided I've had enough of camping. I am much too soft and comfortable to do that these days! So I've mapped out interesting B&B's or hotels for the remainder of the ride.
I was using 4 bags segregated as follows: clothes/toiletries/body care, camping, food, and logistics. The first three are self-explanatory. The logistics included extra tubes and tire and all the electronic support for the ride! The number of items to recharge daily are many - 2 rear lights (one is also a radar), 1 front light, my Garmin bike computer, GoPro and 3 extra batteries, my Garmin watch, my computer (yes, I'm opposed to doing this posting on my phone), my phone, and now I bought a pair of bone conducting headphones so I can listen to the Google prompts for the directions on my ride. I may listen to music too, but we'll see how that goes. The good thing about these headphones is they don't go in your ear so you can still hear what's going on around you. I'll see how that works. I like to hear my surroundings while I'm riding and I may miss something if I've got the music going.
How did we EVER get along without ALL THESE ELECTRONICS! I'll never know. Perhaps thats why my waist belt has grown so much over the past 25 years! But this is another reason why I've given up camping. I need electricity! For the most part, each of these electronics need to be charged daily. There are exceptions, but when I forgot to charge the Garmin at Zach's place the result was a guesstimate of mileage for that day. I'd like to be as precise as possible. The stats speak for themselves and it makes for interesting info!
One other thing I've done is gotten cards to hand out on the ride. I've had lots of people ask what I'm doing and telling them go look at bryantsbrewing.com isn't sufficient. If they're like me they forget the web site the moment they go back to whatever it was they were doing. Many thanks to my friend Darren Handler for designing a card for the ride. It gets the point across well! Take a look at it below. It has both a front and back and I got them printed up at Staples. Now I have something to hand out!
Well, that's it for my break. Hoping to be back on the road tomorrow!
