Our Sabbatical Life

Wednesday, February 22 Day 7 was a best and worst kind of day.  I had no problems getting out of Pensacola and soon found myself entering Alabama.  It felt good to put Florida behind me as it ended up being a much longer--well, wider--state than I expected it to be.  The total biking distance across Florida ended up being 522 miles. I also met my first fellow rider!  Mike is actually doing a circuit of the United States.  He started in January from outside of Atlanta, where he is from, and expects to finish sometime towards the end of the year.  Makes my ride seem small in comparison, but I don't have any desire to extend it either...  Mike, as you can see, if on a recumbent.  I was a little jealous as it looks like a much more comfortable way to ride across the U.S.  (My friend Chuck rides a recumbent, so I teased him by sending a picture of Mike.)  You can find Mike's blog here . Mike is helping to raise money for school...

Sunday, February 19 Given how tired I was from the day before, it only made sense that I got a late start getting out of Tallahassee.  I did take advantage of staying in a bike shop to get in some light maintenance.  I didn't have the energy the night before to prepare my usual steel cut oats (which needs to soak overnight in my Thermos container) so I stopped in at McDonald's for a "Big Breakfast"-- with hotcakes, thank you.  It felt good to start the day with a full belly. I decided that I wasn't going to be driven by miles today and that I was absolutely going to stop by 3pm.  Somehow that pledge to myself was a nice break for my psyche. Weather was good, and I rolled through some nice small towns.  Having grown up in a small town and in a house next to railroad tracks, I even got a bit nostalgic when I came upon a stopped freight train.  Luckily, it started moving soon enough, and I was on my way after a 10-minute delay. I stopped for so...

Friday, February 17 After a good night's sleep at the Zen Hostel, I was able to make an earlier start and got on the road a little after 7am.  It was a chilly start though at 37 degrees!  I was glad to have brought gloves and riding mittens... Getting the earlier start was great, both for my mindset but also for making good progress.  The area outside of Gainesville was quite nice to cycle through, and then I took a break around mile 20 and indulged in some chocolate mini donuts . I went through the town of High Springs which looked to be the epicenter of tubing and possibly scuba diving.  I was able to take some more advantage of local advice from the hostel the night before and jumped on 27 out of High Springs to take the hypotenuse again. After 27, I was mainly on country roads with little traffic, with lots of tiny churches at which I was able to take a break and stretch my back occasionally.  I had mainly been snacking when I rolled into Well...

On my Day 1 ride (on Thursday, Feb. 16), I got a late start and didn't get on the road until a little after 9am.  The late arrival to the campground the night before and the late-night country and western karaoke from my gracious camping neighbors didn't help much. My first full day's route put me on a bike trail where I ran into the first person I've seen during my trip who was aware of the Southern Tier route.  I was taking a break at the Carraway trailhead of the Palatka-Butler trail when Dave pulled into the lot and asked if I was going to St. Augustine or San Diego.  Before I had a chance to reply, he surmised that since my stuff was still too clean surely I must just be beginning and on my way to San Diego. About 12 miles after this encounter, I made my first mistake when I failed to realize that I needed to jump off the trail to catch the road that the map had me follow.  Luckily, I had only gone about a mile before I realized my mistake.  Much f...

It was an eventful Day 0.  I'm calling it Day 0 as I wasn't originally planning to bike. Woke up at 4:45 am to catch a 7:40 flight into Jacksonville, FL.  Had to check the panniers and pay a luggage fee.  Grrr...  As we usually fly only with carry-ons, this was a bit of a bummer. I was a bit dismayed to see one set of panniers arrive in Jacksonville in a different bag. Apparently TSA didn't like my matches (and they left me a note telling me that).  Thankfully they didn't confiscate the butane lighter, only the matchbooks.  I suspect though that the x-rays also didn't like my containers of oil and jam. Uber to Island Bike in St. Augustine where my bike was already assembled and ready to go.  I quickly changed and loaded up the bike.  It was about 4 miles to the coast.  Dipping bike tires in the ocean before starting off is apparently a tradition--to make it officially a coast-to-coast ride--and so I complied (as you can see above). ...

Riding across the U.S. has been something that I have always wanted to do. Up there with hiking the Appalachian trail. With the sabbatical year, it seemed like a perfect time to give it a try. The traditional route is the TransAmerica Trail  and goes from Virginia to Oregon. But as I wanted to do this ride while Julie was teaching in the spring, the Southern Tier  seemed like a better (warmer!) option. Once I settled on the route, it then became a matter of figuring out the logistics. With time on my hands I had to fight the analysis paralysis syndrome. There were two big items I really struggled with that I want to address with this post. THE BIKE There are plenty of touring bikes out there that range in price from $800-$1500 that are ready to ride. You can, of course, go crazy and spend much more. I saw a custom titanium bike on Craigslist that claimed it cost $6000 to put together. It was being sold unused as the guy had blown a disc in his lower back and h...

Will's first major adventure for his "gap year" is a bike-across-U.S.  He is taking the Southern Tier , starting from St. Augustine Beach, FL, and (hopefully) biking all the way to San Diego, CA.  Now it's only days before Will's big date of departure, and plans are coming together--sort of... I'll leave Will to write a post about all the nitty-gritty details of planning this massive undertaking.  All I can say regarding the planning is that it's a good thing he's on his gap year!  Every day, some package  was arriving from Amazon, some mailing from Adventure Cycling , some email on a forum discussion about this.  In fact, we have visited REI more in the last two weeks than we had the last two years! What I can report on is the number of crazy piles of stuff Will has been organizing.  You can see (right above)--and this is a very partial view--the amount of stuff he needs to carry on his bike for over 3000 miles.  I seriously suspect th...

On December 31, 2016, Will started his "gap year."   After more than 20 years in the technology field, and 15 years with one company, Will decided that he wanted to take a little break and see more of the world. In a way, it was a "perfect storm." His company was closing its smaller offices (one of the smallest offices was the one Will was associated with), and he opted to take a generous separation package rather than stay with the company and uproot us from our Chicago home (and my work) to the West Coast.  In mid-life and mid-career, he liked the sound of taking what we (and everyone he worked with) came to call a "gap year," to "recharge" his batteries.  In part, the notion of a sabbatical of sorts was all the more appealing because I would be eligible to take a full-year sabbatical once my spring semester of teaching was over in May 2017.  Well, why not we take a sabbatical year together?! While I am not on sabbatical...