Heading out tomorrow to bike cross country. My plan is to follow Skyline Drive down to Charlottesville, VA then pick up the TransAmerica trail there. From there, I'll follow the TransAmerica trail to Florence, OR then bike down the Pacific Coast to San Francisco. I have a handful of stops mapped that I may or may not actually hit, but I am planning to definitely spend some time in/around Boulder climbing, then hopefully the Tetons and Yosemite (time permitting). Rough map of the route below.
I have a duffel bag packed of climbing gear that I'm planning to meet out in Boulder, then send on to Wyoming and San Francisco. Got plenty of fun stuff bookmarked on Mountain Project :)
I'm going to do the best I can to update this every few days. I'll also be periodically posting to Instagram.
Finally, I'm planning to LiveTrack my location via Garmin. Trying this out for the first few days then may not do it anymore if it's draining batteries too quickly or too annoying to do every day. Either way, each day's progress will be on Strava (strava.jchap.me)
LiveTrack URL: livetracker.jchap.me
This link will work during the day when I am riding and my GPS is on. In the evenings (or early morning) it will just show a screen saying the activity has ended.
Spent all day finishing up packing, picking up some last minute gear and food, and said goodbye to Evan and Sarah. I've been distracted the last couple months with training for Crush the Commonwealth and it's just starting to set in now that I'm leaving tomorrow. Very anxious and excited to get going. The first day is a long day...100mi from Frederick to Front Royal. On my road bike I could do this in about 6.5hrs, but the touring bike fully loaded is extremely heavy so I'm not sure yet what my pace will be like. I am planning to average around 60-70mi/day. Continuing work during the trip, so I'll be riding slightly fewer miles each day than I otherwise would.
More to come.
