Another bicycle tour
“She is at it again!” With Ingrid’s insatiable appetite for adventure, there is never a quiet or relaxed moment in our home. For once again, the maps are rolled out on the table and the phone is buzzing. Yes, the signals are very clear — another tour is in the making.
Some time ago she said, “Darling, this is the last tour we will do.” Well, since then we have done the Southern Tier of the United States, the Northern Trans-America Trial, the tour from Boone to Yorktown VA, the Pacific Coast, the state of Alaska, including parts of the North-West Territories and the Yukon of Canada. When will she ever reach her saturation point? That is a great problem to solve and most interesting. As it is, Ingrid wants to complete the section of the East Coast from St. Augustine, FL to Yorktown, VA, thus completing our circumnavigation of the United States.
When our bikes got stuck on the Dempster’s untamed road we decided to purchase a bike that would accept these hardships and have very low gearing to boost. Ingrid came up with a bike which has a low center of gravity, can accommodate large 2.10 knobby mountain bike tires, is foldable and can be stored and shipped in a suitcase, and one which doesn’t have a top tube so I can get on and off easily. This magnificent high-tech machine is called “Bike Friday“.
With the East Coast in mind, I later was able to uncover the “method of her madness”. This was to become our training trip and “shakedown cruise” for our new bikes. The ultimate tour, as I now discovered, will commence upon return from the East Coast tour. We will pack our panniers once again and head back to Alaska and Canada to finish the Top of the World Highway, and also to fulfill Ingrid’s quest of completing the Dempster Highway. If our energy, mind and bodies are still intact, we would like to end the tour by going down the Alcan to Seattle, WA.
