Emotional Diarrhea

Emotional Diarrhea has been acting as my alarm clock for the past few days. Dreams about biking and packing, bears and camping stir me from my slumber each morning in an ambush. Restlessness moves me out of my bed and straight towards my morning coffee. I sit down and begin to flip through my maps. I trace the miles from camp site to camp site wondering where we will end up staying and how much climbing we will have to do from one day to the next. I look over my checklist adding and subtracting items. The piles of clothes stare blankly at me, questioning me with wicked grins, “is this really enough?”   Then I realize that 1 ½ hours have passed and I am running late for work, so I whisk up my car keys and drive on to begin a 12-15 hour day, split between the jobs that I carry. The constant going helps to ease my nerves which usually subside while I am at work. At day’s end, I rush home and repeat my morning routine in reverse order until my stomach finally settles enough to fall asleep. Is there Pepto for emotional diarrhea?

I love looking at the maps, and am indeed obsessed with them, counting again and again miles between towns. The adventure cycling (ACA) maps are sweet! The maps list campsites, grocery stores, rest areas, ranger stations, hostels, libraries, post offices and more. They are based on actually cycling routes. Our route is made up of parts of 3 different routes; The Northern Tier, The Transamerica Trail and the Great Parks and is all paved roads. Mostly we will be on secondary highways and services will be relatively close by. One piece of our puzzle is currently missing since we were sent the wrong section for the Great Parks. The new section arrived today only to be, once again wrong. I called ACA and they are immediately sending out our Missoula to Whitefish maps, but whew! Talk about last minute.

Last night talked to a woman who has been on about 30 bike tours. She gave me a breakdown of her list; she has got this packing thing down! Dawn offered good advice about clothes to bring and first aid kit items to pack and I was surprised to see that aside from bike tools and a few other items the lists I had compiled into one were pretty similar. The only thing I had been ill prepared to hear about was the reality of snow! I knew rain was an option, but I ASSume-d there would be no snow in September. We know what assuming does right? Dawn also said that we will be eating more than we imagine… I have a feeling I won’t be able to look at peanut butter when we finish this trip!

Last night I ordered my panniers, slacker I know!  (Panniers are the bags that will mount to the side of my rack on the back of my bike and hold all the gear I can stuff in them). I have been lucky enough to get an amazing prod-deal from Pacific Outdoor Equipment out of Bozeman, MT for these bags. They look awesome and Ryan Holm has been very helpful with my last minute ordering process. Cross our fingers they arrive on Monday. I cannot wait to get them on the bike!

Other than that, there isn’t too much more to do except pack it up and ride! If all goes as planned we will be leaving from Fort Collins, CO via Ground Control/roommate Amanda and driving to Lander, WY Wednesday morning. Once in Lander we will eat some lunch, get the bikes down then start riding! It’s not been decided yet, but she may tag along for the first few days and meet up with us in Yellowstone where we can add or subtract items as we see fit. Since we haven’t had the chance to really have a test run, I guess the first part of our trip will be a test run.  

I have decided that I will probably have better internet access while on the road than I do now (since I am just a hill-Billy with no internet or cable), and should be able to keep up with the blog fairly well.  Already my thoughts are making my stomach queasy and I just want to ask out loud, “Can we leave yet?”