Though the last three months have felt interminable, our never-ending saga of downsizing is at long last coming to an end. Unlike the magician’s hat when he keeps pulling rabbits out, we are finally running out of things to sell or give away.

The house is so empty it looks like some of the hostels we’ve stayed in over the years – there’s enough to cover the basics, but there’s a feeling of emptiness and the rooms echo. There’s no life or personality left.

We do have furniture, but what’s left is the junk stuff that’s going to the curb on closing day, or it’s the ‘higher end’ antique furniture we have for sale. The only things remaining in the closets and cabinets are items that will be packed at the last minute and put into storage.

In late August I reached my limit with seeing the FreeCycle items stacked up near the front door (yes, I admit, I got downright cranky) so I spent a long morning writing the ads to post the items. Much to our amazement and delight, every item was picked up in six hours.

That seemed to renew the energy around getting things out the door. We finished corralling and cleaning all our yard and shed items and posted ads for them; we combed through all our remaining furniture and cabinets, cataloguing items and postings ads; we looked at smaller pieces of furniture we thought we’d be willing to sell and posted ads; we took another look at clothing and posted a few more items.
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Chelsea and I are always looking for foods that suit our high-activity lives. Over the years we’ve come across some doozies, but along the way we’ve discovered some solid additions to our repertoire of food ideas. Recently we’ve added a few more to our line-up and we like them well enough that I promised my sister and older brother that I’d share them on the website.

As you probably know by now, Chelsea and I infinitely prefer all natural foods with as few additives and preservatives and as little processing as possible. These entries qualify.

Mrs. May’s Trio Bars

We found these gems in Costco one day on our never-ending hunt for the perfect energy bar for our rides. Along with Cascadian Farms granola bars, these made the short list. We do confess to a preference for these, though. They are one of the least expensive bars we’ve run across, and we love the taste.

Made up of nuts, seeds, and dried fruit, they’ve got cane juice and sea salt added. We get the variety pack, which means we get cranberry, tropical, strawberry, and blueberry (tropical is our least favorite – we don’t like the mango/papaya in it – but it’s not bad at all).

While those folks who have nut allergies will have to be careful, these bars are vegan, kosher, wheat-free, gluten-free, dairy-free, non GMO, and have no trans fats, no additives, no preservatives, and no cholesterol.

It’s like eating our favorite trail mix in a bar. They go down easily, digest easily, and don’t come back up unpleasantly after hard riding in high heat.
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Accessories

If you’re going to have an e-reader, you’ll need a case for sure, unless you rarely read and then only at home. I had quite an education doing the research on cases. The same holds true with having a light to read at night.

M-edge Latitude cases

What a find these were! I searched high and low for the right cover for us, since I know we need something really durable that will protect the Kindle from dirt, grit, dust, and shocks from living on the road.

The M-Edge Latitude fills the need.

It’s a got a two-way zipper with very nice pull-tabs, which makes it easy to charge the Kindle without having to remove it from the case. The Kindle fits inside easily, held in place by four corner straps; none of the functioning is compromised. The inside cover is a nice, smooth, soft, flannel-felt-fleece type of fabric – very easy on the Kindle.

The outside cover is made of easy-clean ballistic nylon, is very stiff and very sturdy, and comes in a variety of bright colors. For us the bright colors are a big advantage, as we want to find the Kindles quickly in our packs, and we want to easily differentiate Chelsea’s from mine.

We have the cases on our Kindles all the time – we never take them off. It’s very easy to read with them on, and we never have worries about fingerprints, dirt and so on getting on the device. We just fold the cover back on itself and read. It’s quite comfortable and we can get several positions to hold our hands.
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Finding books and other resources

Once you’ve got your e-reader, how do you find books for it? At first we simply logged onto Amazon and looked for books. I could see in a heartbeat that we definitely did not have the budget for buying books, not at the rate we read, so I checked out the free books on Amazon. It became obvious immediately that it wasn’t going to be easy to get a good list.

I went searching and somehow found the blog Kindle Nation, which was quite a find for us. They have a site called Kindle Nation Daily, where they post free books on an almost daily basis. It takes a bit to stay on top of the new offerings – you’d be wise to check the list every day.

Kindle Nation is Kindle only (surprise…), but if you have another reader (Kindles are included), www.Smashwords.com is a great site. You’ve also got www.getfreebooks.com, www.manybooks.net, and www.free-ebooks.net. I suggest you Google “free e-books” and see what you come up with.

Another location is Calibre, a website that has a management system for your entire library, can convert books, and more. They’ve recently started a DRM free site which is acquiring new books all the time. These are not necessarily free, but many are low cost and all are DRM free. http://drmfree.calibre-ebook.com/about. You can then use Calibre to convert any book you choose into the appropriate format for your particular reader.
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Using the Kindles

We’ve been using the Kindles extensively for the last five months, and we’ve come to realize that we would prefer the newest version of the Barnes and Noble e-ink reader. We wish we had waited.

Our biggest irritation is how truly awful the navigation is on the Kindle. Granted it’s a bit tough in the touch-screen world to get used to an older style of technology, but that aside, their system is truly unfriendly. I did figure out how to use it, but it’s not intuitive – I still have to remind myself which steps to take every time I want to add a book to a collection, or look up a dictionary definition, or move from my current location. I finally remember how to highlight and how to turn off wi-fi easily.

Finding where you are in the book is a challenge. There’s no page system in most books, there’s a location system instead, and you’d better know how to use it if you want to “flip through the book”. I didn’t understand the system the first time I wanted to flip through, and ended up clicking through at least eighty or ninety clicks to find where I was. Massively frustrating.

Now I know I have to find and note my current location number before going anywhere else in the book, but you better either have a good memory or write it down before you can get back to it! And having to type in the location using the keyboard is slow and painful.
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Leaving on our trip without books is absolutely unthinkable, given how much I love reading. I was the kid who stayed awake at night under the covers with a flashlight, reading. I’d read the back of cereal boxes if nothing else was available. I read voraciously – at one time I read a thousand pages a day; I’d walk down the aisles of stores with a book open in front of my face.

I get heart palpitations at the thought of being without books.

Chelsea is nearly the same, though she’s willing to spend time playing Angry Birds, Scrabble, Dropword, or just listening to music. I’m not so much interested in games on a little screen. Give me books.

During the first part of our trip from 2007-2009, we got really good at tracking down free or low-cost paperbacks. We discovered campgrounds frequently have books left behind by other campers; libraries often sell old paperbacks for less than a dollar or they allow an exchange; many small stores will have a shelf or two of books. People with whom we stayed would often give us books, too.

Then of course there was Sean Gayle of Patti’s Book Nook in Gueydan, LA, who let us borrow, read and return, borrow read and return, borrow read and return. Sean gets our highest lifetime book award – our “Book-Loaning Hero”.
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For those of you wondering about our multi-functionality, here’s our awesome list of what we will achieve by using the new phones. (Note: we are looking at various apps to maintain our systems when we are out of wireless range.)

Communication

An agreement Chelsea and I made early on, being two women alone on the road, is that we won’t separate from each other for any distance at all.

That means we carry cell phones with us at all times so we can call each other with questions or concerns. The most common situation we run into is when we pull up to a store or market. One of us generally stays with the bikes and gear while the other runs inside. It’s been really handy to text or call each other when the person inside has questions, rather than having to abandon the shopping cart to run outside.

It’s also a lot easier to make a call to find a hotel or pension and book a room than have to bicycle around hot and tired and discover that everything is full.

Email

With a few keystrokes, I can now send and receive emails on our Traveling Roses account and my two personal accounts without having to have my computer or laptop on. That means anytime we have access to wireless in another country, we can very quickly catch up on emails without having to drag out the laptop.
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Finding the right technology for our trip has been a real challenge, especially since things change dramatically every year and we don’t have an unlimited budget to buy the latest innovation each year. That being said, since 2007 phones have been high on the list of things to solve.

One of our most important goals, as you know by now, is streamlining our gear –we want more functionality for less weight and less bulk. One of the standard questions for anything we buy, clothing or gear, is whether it has multiple uses or functions. We already know that smartphones have wonderful functionality.

Our biggest challenge has been that we are headed to areas outside the US and we need a global phone. When I see what the smartphones can do, I’m not willing to use a non-smartphone, but whatever smartphone we pick still needs to be global. What I’ve run into is that the global phones simply haven’t had the functionality and good reviews that the US smartphones do.
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Selling our Trailers – End of an Era

What finally settled us on switching was the ease of not having to take down the trailers under awkward circumstances. We are traveling in third-world countries for the next eight years or more, and we will encounter awkward situations.

If we ever have to take a bus or a train, or when we need to put our gear on a small funky ferry boat to cross a lake from one country to the next, we can’t afford the extra time of dismantling the trailers (though it is amazingly fast and easy). We don’t want to have the extra bulk and weight of the trailers and then have to figure out what to do with everything inside the trailer.

We did think seriously about switching the type of trailer we had and getting large waterproof bags for our gear, but that still left us with the challenge of the extra time to dismantle the trailer and the extra weight and bulk of the trailer itself.

One much smaller factor, but one we may find is a wonderful unexpected bonus, is that we will be riding much closer together with panniers instead of having the length of the trailers between us. It gives a better chance to talk while riding, and perhaps we will even starting drafting each other.
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Trailers versus panniers

From the first day that Chelsea and I decided to go on tour we have thought about the age-old question of panniers versus trailers. Both approaches have their (sometimes) fanatic fans.

While we saw the upsides and downsides of both, we finally decided that trailers were the way to go for us. We liked the ease of loading the trailers, we liked the ease of access to our gear, we liked the fact that we could simply and easily unhitch the trailers when we wanted to use our bikes without the gear.

But the most compelling for us was the ease of maneuvering the bikes with a fully loaded trailer. The bottom line was that we felt safer with the trailers than we felt hauling a fully loaded bike, especially since we’d not done unsupported touring yet.

Then of course came the decision of single-wheel trailers vs. two-wheel trailers. That was easy, as we had no need for single track, and we saw first-hand on our 2006 cross-country trip how annoying it was to have the single-track trailers lie down sideways when the bike was laid down. Getting at gear was far more difficult than with the upright two-wheeled trailers, and we’d read that stability while riding, especially at speeds downhill, wasn’t the greatest.

Personal experience always helps too. Back in 1986 we hauled twenty-six-month-old Chelsea in a Burley trailer from the Oregon border to San Francisco, and we knew firsthand how easy they were to hitch and unhitch, how stable they were while riding (even when your “cargo” is wiggling and squirming and talking), and how easy it was to take a break and not worry about the “cargo” tipping out sideways.
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