Ride the Olympic Peninsula

Tomorrow Karen arrives from Iowa and we will begin our journey. Hopefully I will get her bike put back together tonight so we'll only have tiny problems to deal with and can spend the rest of the day relaxing and trying to figure out what we forgot.

For me this is a trial run for hopefully longer self contained rides in the future. I'm already fairly familiar with the route having cycled many parts of it in the past but I have never carried my home (tent, sleeping bag and pad), my kitchen (stove, fuel, pans and dishes), my bathroom (soap, shampoo, toothbrush and towel), my closet (clothes for riding - cold, wet, hot, dry and relaxing) and my garage (tools and repair items) before, so that challenge still awaits both of us.

Sunday we'll be taking a ferry ride to the real start of our ride and follow the edge of the penisula, mostly on highway 101 around the Olympic Mountains. I am hoping we get a dry and warm week of riding. The Olympic Mountains average between 120 and 167 inches of rain a year with Mount Olympus getting up to 200 inches per year. While this is the driest part of the year, all that rain has to fall out of the sky sometime.

Click here for a map of our route.

Tour Journals

I finally got the journals posted for most the the bike tours I've been on over the last 5 years. The Southern Cross was my cross country trip in 2002 from Disneyland to Disney World. Short tours consists of trips of about one week in length. There's also a summary of the Ride the East trip, a 23 day trip down the east coast. I hope to get the full journal up soon. Happy reading, hope you enjoy it.

Bicycle Touring Booklist

I've added a list of bicycle touring books to the blog. These are books I have read except for a few (which are in my pile to read soon). They're sort of in order of what I think is the best on down to my least favorites. The first bicycle narrative book I read was Miles From Nowhere by Barbara Savage (at least 20 years ago) and after reading all of these books it's still my favorite. If I can't be on my bike at least I can be an armchair traveler and read about the many places others have gone.