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Back in March I began planning for my ride across the country. I first
investigated the various tour outfits that offer such an adventure, but
none of them quite matched what I was looking for.

• Some of the rides did not meet a true definition of a ride across the USA, such as cutting into Canada or taking a ferry across Lake Michigan (c'mon really?).
  
• A couple of rides made me feel like a adult version of hitting up friends and relatives for a fundraiser -- i.e. "if you just donate 3 cents per mile for [fill in you chosen charity]",
  these fundraisers even make it easy with on-line pledges. What they don't tell the contributors is that they are funding the total expense of your ride with a minority of the funds actually going to the cause itself.
  
• Others just didn't work out for the time of the year - I preferred the fall.

When all possibilities were explored, I concluded that for just about the same amount of money as the single room cost for most of the tour companies, Karen could join me. After all, this would be essentially the same as we did for last years ride around Lake Michigan and we
could stay in our preferred Hilton products and earn those reward points that have funded out vacation stays to Kauaii, Waikiki, Hawaii, Paris, and Times Square.

And now for something completely different...

I have put close to 5000 miles on my bicycles so far this year. I planned for about 400 more miles but have been spinning on my bicycle trainer in my basement for the past four weeks (ugh) due to the cast on my left arm. A mishap occurred midway though a century ride on a Sunday that took me along the Chicago Lake shore paths up through the northern suburbs. Coming to a stop to avoid some clueless cyclists (too kind of a term for them), I simply could not unclip before keeling over. Normally this would be just a bit of embarrassment that has happened to many, many riders, but having been a bit apprehensive from an injury to my right shoulder earlier this year, I must have reached out while falling and placing a bit too much stress on the wrist area where a small fracture was revealed two days later after Karen insisted that I see a doctor. I was a bit reluctant since it really didn't bother me that much. After all I finished the majority of the century ride that way. The injury was like a flashback to the 60's Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In. The show frequently used a transition between sketches of a man in a yellow raincoat and hat pedaling a tricycle and then just tipping over.

If my minor cycling mishap had occurred any later, then the trip may have been postponed for this year.




Check, Double Check, and Triple Check

Planning a trip of this magnitude takes a lot of work, especially if you are as anal as I am with respect to planning. The results of many of these steps below can be found at Cross Country USA Bike Trip - planned for Fall 2009 Here are just some of the steps in the process that I took.

• Investigate the routes of all tour outfits and decide on the start and end points
• Identify the length of each leg and research lodging destination for each night's stay
• Analyze the weather for each leg along the way and build a web page to pull up the 10 day forecast for each location as we move across the country as well as a 36-hour hour-by-hour forecast.
  
• Research the popular cycling route sites, particularly Bikely and MapMyRide. Also check out sites like OpenCycleMap which is a wki type open source map of trails and bike routes.
• Use Google Maps/Google Earth, and Microsoft's Bing to view street view and aerial views of potential routes.
• Mark out the desired course in my custom routing web page Mixed Road & Direct Routing solution that I adapted from another site
• Transfer the route in Garmin Mapsource (I use a Garmin GPSMap 76csx unit on my bicycles)
  
• Mark up with waypoints highlighting interstate entry and exits (yes, I will have about 300 miles on interstates in the southwest - mostly in Arizona.
• Transfer the tracks to another application called Topofusion that assigns the elevation a each trackpoint and then write a software program to analyze the climbs.
  
• Reduce the number of trackpoints to 500 for each daily leg. As an aside, a few years back I contacted a software developer from Finland to adapt code he wrote to reduce the number of trackpoints. I converted his BASIC program into JavaScript to make a web based tool called GPX Trkpt Reduce. This allow me to maintain the integrity of the track path while reducing the number of track points to 500 which is the maximum number allowed by my Garmin unit in display mode.
• Analyze the AT&T coverage maps along the route and mark the start and end points along the route where there is no coverage.
• Analyze the various maps sources - Garmin, Google, Bing and mark waypoints where there are differences from aerial photographs or street views - there are a few dozen of these.
  
• Research and locate county maps for all areas where Google street view is not available to determine if the road is paved or not. In many cases an aerial photo can detect the stripes of a highway, but many secondary roads have no stripes, so this provides some measure of assurance that what is in the aerial photo is a paved road.
• Using Google Maps, build a photo slideshow every half mile or so to show turns, road conditions, etc.
• Using Google Earth build a movie of the daily route primarily to show terrain.
• Build a difficulty index for each leg.
• Compile a packing list of needed biking clothing, parts, tools, supplies, as well as regular travel needs, such as clothing, electronics, etc.
  

I inventoried (photo and description of contents for each bag) everything for the Lake Michigan trip and it worked rather well. The exercise of packing and then unpacking to take the picture reminded me of a photo exhibition at some airport a few years back (perhaps the O'hare international terminal) called Material World which showed all of a families possessions arranged outside their home for a portrait.

This trip is about twice a long plus the ride to the west coast and from the east coast. We have a car topper (Thule Sidekick) that will store a bike stand, pump and several of the bags so that we have more room in th e trunk. Last trip the trunk was jam packed. Repac king the car each day got uglier as the trip progressed.

In contrast to the Lake Michigan ride in which I started the ride from home and ended at home, for this Bike USA trip, we also need to stow the daily biking gear until the ride starts on the west coast and after it ends on the east coast. The additional gear includes the helmet, hydration backpack, handlebar bag, shoes, saddle bags for each bike, GPS mounts and GPS unit. I have a total of 9 bags. Karen has just about as many, maybe a couple more. I actually have placed a few bacgs within the larger luggage pirces to consolidate and separate only if more room is needed. This will make it easier for Karen when checking into the motel each day.