2018… the prep

We’re getting ready for the 2018 ride. This year we’re sticking to the left coast of our beautiful nation and popping into British Columbia for a few days on Vancouver Island. Our route will include three ferry rides – Anacortes to Friday Harbor, Friday Harbor to Sidney and Victoria to Port Angeles. We’ll take ten days to make the roundtrip for an estimated 2,300 +/- miles.

We will be traveling some familiar routes but will also be experiencing new roads. We’ll go to Burns the first day and always, that’s a grind. The second day we will travel to Wenatchee, WA and from there, we ride through the northern Cascades over to Anacortes. The next few days will be all new to us – the San Juan Islands and Victoria, BC. We’ll re-enter the US after a ferry ride from BC down to the Olympic Peninsula. We’re looking forward to seeing this area especially since we both recently read Undaunted Courage, by Stephen Ambrose. It’s the story of Lewis and Clark and their journey to the Pacific. There are many references to the Olympic Peninsula area in that book so we’re ready to explore it for ourselves! We’ll take the following three days to meander home.

This year, we’ll be communicating with each other using intercoms. This is something new for us – we’ve always used hand signals to communicate which has worked well. We’ve taken a few short rides to try it out and it’s been nice to share experiences real time vs. later in the day when you may or may not remember something. Due to the delay in engaging the intercom and habit, we’ll probably still use hand signals for urgent communication.

As always, the first step is to change the tires on the bike and give it a general look over. We also replaced the front brakes. Seems like we always find the hottest weekend of the summer to this – 105 degrees in a hot garage.