I’m typing this from beautiful site #223 at Governor Dodge State Park. We have our half of the campground to ourselves, except for one lonely raccoon in the middle of the night who looked longingly at our bags of food dangling, tantalizing him, suspended off the ground from a tree.
We didn’t make it to the site until around 6pm yesterday. We found that on the crushed limestone trail, with 50 lbs of gear apiece, an average speed of about 11-12mph is about right. That was a nice, easy spin, but definitely a far cry from our normal “roadie” pace when we’re riding with friends. I’m happy to report that there were no mechanical issues, except for a bit of reshuffling and resituating of weight to reduce some front-wheel “shimmy” on my bike.
Part of bike touring is planning ahead. Liz and I came up with what we call the 2:00 plan. When 2:00 hits, we need to stop and ensure that we have a plan for the following things:
- Bread, Pita and /or tortillas (carbs)
- Peanut Butter
- Water, Liquids, Gatorade
- Dinner plan
- 10 x energy bars, gels, or chewies
- 4 x instant oatmeals
- coffee for AM
- 1 x bottle stove fuel
- Sunscreen
The purpose of this plan is to make sure that we’re not forgetting things that will be essential during the next 12 hours. Sometimes we might get ourselves into a campsite and then not have the energy to head out to a grocery store, and then we might wake up without fuel (body or stove) or coffee.
Yesterday’s 2:00 plan moment had us on a trail almost to Dodgeville. The truth is we’d cheated a bit and started thinking about things a bit before 2:00, but that’s ok. We agreed to stop at the first grocery store of size (Wal-Mart, it turned out), which we located after a bit of Benny Hill traveling. We replenished our supplies, bought dinner (fresh pasta raviolis — family size or ‘Merican size) and headed to the state park.
More on what should have been a quick hop of 4-5 miles in the next post. Also, check back on these posts as we fill in pictures from our phones.
Today it’s going to be 100 degrees and humid. We’re packing up and exploring the park a bit, then heading down to a hotel in Spring Green with AC and a pool. We’ll probably get 20-30 miles in on the bikes — plenty, says Liz. Livin’ the life!
