The time has come to ship my bicycle to San Francisco! John and I decided to use REI in San Francisco to re-assemble our bikes. I used my local bike shop Earls Cyclery & Fitness to box up my bike and ship it to San Francisco. Earls uses Bike Flights to do the shipping. It turns out that FedEx does the actual shipping. In case you are wondering the shipping with insurance will cost ~ $90. I dropped my bike off on Monday and it should be on the west coast by early next week.
3 Ferry Ride
In preparation for my tour, I have been riding a lot this past spring and summer. I have used some of the rides posted by the Green Mountain Bicycle Club.
On Sunday, my wife Cindy and I did the 3 Ferry ride. We started in Burlington, took the ferry to Port Kent. Rode our bikes to the Plattsburgh ferry and rode it to Grand Isle. We rode to the Island Line Bike Ferry over the Colchester Causeway and rode all the way back to the Burlington lakefront. Parts of the Burlington Bike path are under renovation and we had to detour on to North Avenue.
The total ride length with the detour was about 41 miles. It really is a nice ride and I highly recommend it. There are numerous lake views on the ride.
The Bike Ferry on the Colchester Causeway
The Colchester Causeway
The view from The Spot on the Burlington Waterfront.
Motivation (Blog)
What is the motivation for this blog? Good question. My brother John is riding his bicycle from San Francisco to Boston starting in late August 2017. I am riding with him for the 1st two weeks of his tour. A few folks have asked me if I was planning to keep a blog about the ride. At first, I thought I might just use Facebook to document my trip, but the more I thought about it I realized a blog might me allow to post details about the ride in a more organized way.
Also, an IT professional, I thought a blog might be a good way for me to learn more in a hands-on way about the “cloud”. I will spare you all the nerdy details, but for those who are interested, this blog is self-hosted in Amazon Web Services US East region and uses WordPress software.
So what’s up with the name of blog? I would like to say it is in honor of the recently passed major league baseball trading deadline… as in ”traded for a player to be named later”. But I have to fess up it is pretty much a lack of creativity on my part!