T Minus 19 Hours and counting.

The past few days have been spent tying up loose ends (mainly packing related, and making sure things run smoothly at home during my 10 week absence)  before I leave the house at 3:45 tomorrow morning for my flight to Vancouver.

I think the best way to give you a perspective on things is through pictures:

This is basically everything I have to take for the trip, and more importantly fit into my bike box and bag to travel and into two laundry baskets during the tour. Bike at the back, camping gear in front of the bike, bike clothes and spare parts on the left and camp clothes and shoes on the right.  I have also packed a massage stick, and a Wiffle Ball and Bat for entertainment at the campsites.

 The constraints are that our clothes (bike and camp) must fit into no more than two laundry baskets, and to get there I can only bring my bike box, a duffel bag, a carry on and my computer case.  The challenge was to figure out how to fit all the stuff in the allotted space.

 The airline has restrictions on the weight of each item, so I trotted out the bathroom scale to make sure I complied.  I am already paying extra for the bike box (max 70 lbs.), so I tried to optimize everything between that and my checked duffel bag (50 lbs.).

It is apparent that the hours I spent playing TETRIS have finally yielded some fruit, as I "passed" the first challenge - making sure everything fit into the two laundry baskets.
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The next challenge was to get everything into the luggage available and check the weight.  After much trial and error, success!   The bike box, fully packed with all the "voids" filled by my clothing and tent, weighs in at 66 lbs. and the duffel with my sleeping bag and other bulky stuff at 35 lbs.  Thankfully, all this goes in the truck, and we don't have to ride it to the next campsite each day.

  

One final check against my packing list and then the box gets taped up and loaded in the car for my 3:45 A.M. departure to the Airport.  Many thanks to Eric for being my chauffeur tomorrow.   I doubt I will get much sleep, if any tonight - par for the course for the past week or so - but will make up for it on the plane tomorrow.

After 10 months of preparation, it is hard to believe that this adventure will start tomorrow (in reality it started 10 months ago).  In recognition of that I have changed the Blog Summary to reflect the change in status from "plan" to "reality".  I am looking forward to actually meeting the other riders this week!  Thank y'all for your kind words of encouragement and support to date.

If you want to get automatically notified when I add to the blog - it may be somewhat sporadic during the ride, as I am not sure of when/where we will have network access - you can add the "RSS" feed to your e-mail or web browser. 

The address for the RSS feed is:

http://mysummerbehindbars.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
with this set up whenever I post some news you will get a notification.

Have a great summer!

Bill