{"id":7,"date":"2008-06-25T12:56:00","date_gmt":"2008-06-25T16:56:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/allenf.com\/blog\/?p=7"},"modified":"2010-05-04T22:35:44","modified_gmt":"2010-05-05T02:35:44","slug":"preparations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/allenf.com\/blog\/2008\/06\/25\/preparations\/","title":{"rendered":"Preparations"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Jodi and I are getting ready for this summer&#8217;s bicycle tour. It&#8217;s not an epic trip like Tanzania two years ago, or our long-anticipated but not yet realized trip to Eastern Europe. We&#8217;re keeping it simple and keeping it local this year. On Saturday morning we will roll out of our condo parking lot and head towards Washington, DC. Actually, we&#8217;ll head to Bethesda, MD, just north of DC. Jodi&#8217;s sister and her family live in Bethesda and their house is our target.<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;ll be following a portion of Adventure Cycling&#8217;s Atlantic Coast route. I followed another portion of this route back in 1999 when I started from DC heading south with the intention of riding to my parents&#8217; house in South Carolina. (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.allenf.com\/EastCoast99.htm\">http:\/\/www.allenf.com\/EastCoast99.htm<\/a>) That trip was aborted when I ran into Hurricane Floyd. Hopefully this year&#8217;s trip won&#8217;t be quite as eventful!<\/p>\n<p>Our route will take us southwest from Boston towards north-eastern Connecticut, then across northern Connecticut (lots of hills!) and into New York State. We&#8217;ll cross the Hudson River at Poughkeepsie then head south swinging west around New York City and heading for the Delaware Water Gap. From here we&#8217;ll swing a bit west through Valley Forge and into Pennsylvania before heading south again. We&#8217;ll either go through Baltimore or swing out to the west to go around it, then head in towards the DC beltway until we finally arrive in Bethesda.<br \/>It looks like the whole trip should only be about 700 miles, a comfortable, easy, two week ride.<\/p>\n<p>We have started to make piles of gear on the living room floor, and come Friday evening we&#8217;ll have to stuff it all into our panniers. We haven&#8217;t used what I refer to as &#8220;the big tent&#8221; in four years, so I set that up the other day to make sure we had all the stakes and poles and that everything was in good shape. Since I have spent the last year or so converting my backpacking gear over to ultra-light stuff, it seems like a monster. I&#8217;m glad we&#8217;ll be carrying it on our bikes and not on our backs! It is a luxurious abode, nonetheless.<\/p>\n<p>We should have decent cell phone coverage in the area we are touring this year, so I will be bringing my Palm Treo and a foldable bluetooth keyboard which makes writing emails much easier. I&#8217;ll be using this to update this blog. If you&#8217;d like to follow along on this year&#8217;s tour there is a link to the right that will allow you to subscribe and be notified by email whenever the blog is updated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Jodi and I are getting ready for this summer&#8217;s bicycle tour. It&#8217;s not an epic trip like Tanzania two years ago, or our long-anticipated but not yet realized trip to Eastern Europe. We&#8217;re keeping it simple and keeping it local this year. On Saturday morning we will roll out of our condo parking lot and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bicycle_touring"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/allenf.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/allenf.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/allenf.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/allenf.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/allenf.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/allenf.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":278,"href":"http:\/\/allenf.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7\/revisions\/278"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/allenf.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/allenf.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/allenf.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}