And so it begins...

Hello friends and family, this is Ed speaking.

We're in Santa Barbara now, about to get a good night's sleep before we dip our wheels in the Pacific Ocean tomorrow morning. Before most trips, I put off packing until 2am the night before we leave, stressing myself out, and keeping Nancy up. This time she forced me to pack ahead of time. Novel concept! This morning I was running all over the house for a couple hours taking care of last minute items, and then I realized I had two hours before we were planning on leaving, and everything was done. Wow.

My dad flew with us to Santa Barbara in my plane. We really wanted to have my plane in Charleston when we got there, but it's expensive to hire a professional pilot to take your plane across the country for you. I thought to myself, "Who do I know that works cheap, has no schedule, and can fly my plane?" Then it hit me--my dad! He's a pilot too, and though he has his own plane, he likes mine because it's got lots of nifty gizmos for you to play with as you cruise along on autopilot. So he flew out here (on a commercial plane), rode with us to Santa Barbara, and tomorrow he'll take my plane home to Wisconsin. Sounds like he'll be taking the scenic route, so it may be quite a while before he's home. At the end of our trip, he's bringing the plane out to Charleston for us. How convenient!

Once we got checked into the hotel, we met up with our Trek Travel group. There are about 25 people on the trip. Nancy and I appear to be the only honeymooners. We're hoping to make everyone sick with our lovey-dovey you're-the-best-no-you're-the-best honeymooner stuff. Nancy and I both know most of our guides from previous trips--her as a guide, me as a guest. Although we plan to spend much of the trip listening to Harry Potter or the New York Times on our iPod's, Nancy and I are looking forward to getting to know the other crazies on the trip.

Alright, I've got to go, I'm keeping Nancy up. We'll let you know how the first day goes tomorrow.

Ed

Training

A month before the trip began, we went on a 10-day, 675-mile bike trip on Skyline Drive and the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia and North Carolina with Black Bear Adventures. We figured the shorter daily miles would ease us into Cross-Country form-- and boy did we underestimate that trip! (We overlooked the 55,000 feet of climbing described in the literature.) But we made it, in good spirits and better shape than when we started off. (Okay, Ed was in both better spirits and shape all along. His perpetual good humour and capacity for self-punishment amaze me.) That's us on the right.


It was a great trip, with beautiful scenery, safe roads, and good company. Blackbear Adventures owner and guide Paul Wood runs a pro trip with everything we needed, including some good ol' Southern soul food like fried chicken, biscuits and gravy. Definitely recommended if you're looking for an unforgetable cycling trip in the Blue Ridge Mountains: www.blackbearadventures.com

The Ride

(Photo by Trek Travel -- check out the trip at www.trektravel.com)

This is it. 3,178 miles beginning in Santa Barbara, CA and ending in Charleston, SC. 31 days in the saddle, with 3 rest days spread throughout the trip in Parker, AZ; Taos, NM; and Nashville, TN. Average mileage is about 100 miles per day. Do you know what this means? Yeah yeah-- beautiful countryside, challenging terrain, the ride of a lifetime, yada yada yada. But we've got our priorities straight: for one whole month, we can eat whatever we want-- shovel in the ice cream and pasta and bacon by the plateful-- and still not have enough. This is honeymooning at its best.

...And the honeymoon

With cycling playing such a big role in how we met and how we've lived our lives together, what better way to celebrate our honeymoon than by going on a bike trip? And so the idea was born, at first as a joke, then with growing seriousness. Why not take Trek Travel up on their once-in-a-lifetime bike trip across the USA, from sea to shining sea, covering over 3000 miles in 34 days? We could go on a relaxing tropical vacation, we supposed, or explore a new part of the world-- but why not instead explore our own backyard, on our bikes, while we're young and (hopefully) able?

So this is a blog of our adventures, good and bad, for our friends and families who want to follow our progress from mid-September to mid-October 2007 as we travel from coast to coast on our bikes. We'll update whenever the internet connections and our energy levels allow. And we'll try to keep talk of saddle sores to a minimum.

Please e-mail us if you feel like it-- we'll need all the encouragement we can get!

...Then comes marriage...

We got married in California in June, and we started that day off with a bike ride around the Stanford campus.



We absolutely loved our wedding cake-- and it tasted just as great as it looked. Julie Durkee at Torino Bakery looked at some photos of Alpe d'Huez, the first climb we did side-by-side, for inspiration. (You can't see it here, but our names are written out on the almond paste "road" winding up the cake.)

From Paris, with love...

Here's the background:

We met in Italy during the Giro d'Italia. Nancy was guiding bike trips with the Trek Travel bike tour company, and Ed was a guest on a trip in the Dolomites. We had our first date in Paris 2 months later, the day before the end of the 2006 Tour de France. This photo was taken on our first date-- which began with a bike ride around the City of Lights. Ed gave Nancy a Google cycling kit that matched his before the ride-- he sure knows his way to a woman's heart.