We’re back online at long last. It has felt like forever since we have connected with the outside world, but our lives and adventures have meanwhile been rolling along steadily.
Where have we been?
Since we last wrote we have progressed from Satellite Beach through the rest of FL – Port Orange, Beverly Beach, and St Augustine FL. Attempting to escape the heat, we took a bus through Georgia, stopping in Savannah; and South Carolina, stopping in Charleston; and then finished the ride in Wilmington, North Carolina. We rode (in triple digit heat) from Wrightsville Beach in Wilmington to Surf City/North Topsail Beach, NC; from there to Goose Creek Campground on Bogue Sound, then off to Otway NC. From Otway we had a hot and difficult day (serious heat exhaustion) getting to Ocracoke on the Outer Banks.
From Ocracoke we rode to Frisco NC, where we caught a ride with a solo RV adventurer up to Kitty Hawk NC, and then on to Salisbury MD. From Salisbury MD we took a bus up to New York City, where we spent a frantic hour collecting our things and changing buses, and then we were off by bus to Boston. Our good buddy Mark Carrera picked us up in Boston – we arrived finally at 4 a.m. with an original arrival time scheduled for 11:30 p.m. the night before – and drove us to his house in Dover NH, where we finally crawled into bed at 6 a.m.
We’ve been in Dover since then, at Mark’s house, getting things updated; reviewing our options; reorganizing; doing bike maintenance and repair; getting caught up on everything that didn’t get done while on the road; and catching up on our sleep. We don’t have cell phone signal in the house, which slows down communication, and our data signal is very weak and therefore very slow, which also slows things down. It’s actually been okay with us, as we have been so very tired, and as we have needed to catch up on so many things.
So now that you know where we’ve been, you’re likely wondering what we’ve been doing and how we’ve been. In looking back over the last few months, there have been three main themes – incredible heat, lack of funds, and wonderful people.
Heat, heat, and more record heat
The heat has certainly been a defining factor on this part of our trip. We were riding nearly every day in triple digit heat, and we could never get away from it. I read an article a few weeks ago on weather.com, and the writer was talking about August and what a record month it was in terms of rain, drought, and heat extremes. It seems that several cities in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia (including Washington-Dulles area), had record-breaking heat in August. Those are the same routes that we have been traveling, and we can certainly attest to the extreme heat.
Along the coast, many campgrounds don’t have any shade, so there was nowhere to go to get out of the sun and heat. Many of them are also a distance away from services, so escaping by sitting in a restaurant or library was impossible, and hopping into a local Starbucks wasn’t going to happen (there weren’t any around). Our tent would never get below 83 degrees, even at night, with seriously high humidity. On rest days, the tent would get up to 120 degrees or more – by 8:30 a.m. it would be up to 97 degrees, and we would have to get any electronics and toiletries, contact lens solution and so on out of the tent, and hide it somewhere out of the heat, or it would be ruined. When riding, we had to “bury” our food and toiletries under our clothing and travel pillows, or they would spoil.
The UV index was brutal, and we would begin with heat exhaustion symptoms early in the day. We did have electrolyte replacement drinks, and we went through close to 3 gallons of fluids (water plain and water with electrolyte replacements) each day. Towards the end, we began getting heat rashes on our legs and backsides that wouldn’t “heal” overnight. We now have an unusual tan line, not only from the usual cycling-shorts line, but a deeper brown where the heat rash got exposed to severe sun again.
When heat is that high, it begins frying the brain as well, and it kills the appetite. We found ourselves nearly unable to do anything much except sit and try to stay out of the sun. We certainly didn’t want to get back on the bicycles out in the sun again and go anywhere; we didn’t want to cook; we didn’t want to do bicycle maintenance or any other organizing; we just wanted to do as little as we could and try to conserve our energy. We could read, as long as it didn’t require any thought, so we went through a number of books, just out of self-preservation (there’s a lot to be said for distracting oneself in difficult situations).
When we did get to a campground that had shade and some Internet signal, we tended to stay a few days, partly just for the rest and to be out of the sun, and partly to be able to work on our website contract. By doing that, we met wonderful people, got to understand the local area better, and had great mini-adventures.
Even though we really wanted to ride the whole route, and we had no trouble with our legs or with the cycling itself, we decided to hop sections of the route by bus in order to escape the heat. We didn’t go on this trip to brutalize ourselves, and the heat was definitely in the brutal category. Hauling 70 pounds of gear on a bicycle in direct sun with 101-115+ degrees, and a UV index of 10+, is not my idea of being kind to my body. We also don’t want to trash ourselves physically so early in the trip because we have at least 40,000 more miles to go. When we looked back and saw the temperatures and the terrain in the areas we skipped, we felt very proud of ourselves that we had the sense to know when to adapt.
One distinct side advantage of the bus trips is that it has given us several chances to work out our systems of breaking down and shipping our trailers and bikes and gear. There was a definite learning curve! We know lot more about bike maintenance now, and we know a lot more about how to travel with our gear. We have worked out a whole new system for doing things now, that will have positive spillover effects on our riding, and we are so grateful to have discovered the glitches now when it’s easier to handle things and change our systems than being deep in the heart of Mexico or Central America without the same resources we have here.
Lack of funds – gotta change this part of the trip!
We have been financing our trip by working along the way on a start-up website. The whole virtual office thing is another column I’ll be writing, but suffice it to say for now that there’s been a learning curve on that, too. However, we have managed to get in our time about every two weeks to get our tasks done, by “parking” ourselves at a campsite and bingeing on work – it was nothing for me to spend 10-12 hours a day for several days in a row sitting at a picnic table with the laptop up, moving around and following the shade, while I moved forward on the project, with Chelsea alternating with me.
The downside is that it is a start-up project, and they have been having cash flow difficulties, which has resulted in us not getting paid on time – anywhere from a few days to two weeks late (and we didn’t have any warning that we wouldn’t get paid). That has had very difficult repercussions for us, as this is our only source of income right now. It’s one thing to be dealing with the heat and with the rigors of a major bicycle trip like this, but it’s another thing entirely to be suddenly scrambling to cover our cell phone bill and wondering if we can pay for our groceries and our campsite for the night. It’s created a lot of extra work for us in figuring out what to do, and in rescheduling payments and so on. If it had been only once it would be one thing, but it’s happened every time for the last 6 weeks or so, and it gets very wearing.
We have given a lot of thought to what we want to do now, in case the project continues to have cash flow challenges. We like the project, and we still believe in its ability to be an extremely financially successful site, but we aren’t owners, and we haven’t been offered any other compensation either in the way of stock options or the like. We also need to cover our cash needs in the interim. We wanted to give ourselves time to think things over, and we will have a good talk with them in the next day or so, before we make the next decision.
Raising funds
We have been really amazed and delighted by the number of people who have been enthusiastic about our trip, and who have expressed a strong desire to follow our progress, so we are thinking seriously about moving up our timelines and starting to work on writing articles for magazines. We will need a better camera than we have now, and we haven’t solved that yet, but we’ve started the process of outlining ideas and researching magazines that may be interested in publishing our stories. If you know of any, or have any connections, please email us (travelingroses@gmail.com)!
We’ve also been pulling things together to do a fund-raising drive. We’re getting our database updated (it’s a big job), getting our blogs caught up, getting our photo albums caught up, and getting support documentation done. If you have any ideas about helping us do fund-raising, or you’d like to help us with that, let us know right away.
We’re also thinking about writing short books about how to do a big adventure like this, and we’ve begun reading other adventure books, looking at what is published and who publishes it, etc. We’ve been making notes steadily on the various areas, and I could write for several days without taking a breather, just with what we have so far.
Wonderful new people
One of the most notable, if not the most notable aspect to our trip so far has been the incredible people that we are meeting. We’ve had people take us into their homes; loan us cars; help us out with errands; give us food; take us out to eat; take us bird watching; give us large discounts on purchases and hotel rooms; give us cash donations; teach us how to fish; give us fresh fish for dinner; share RVs with us; give us great advice and suggestions; and give us rides when we needed them.
This doesn’t include the dozens of wonderful fellow campers and others we’ve met who loaned us chairs, gave us fresh fish and organic vegetables, brought us food back from restaurants, sent us off with picnic lunches, and who did any number of other incredibly helpful things for us.
And neither does it include our awesome family and friends who have pitched in and helped out in a multitude of ways – Paul and Denise and Chandler Mahoney, Alex Taugher-Dias, Wayne Wagie, Eric Bailey at Canoe Outfitters, and Evelyn Levenson.
So here we are…
So here we are in Dover, New Hampshire, enjoying all the comforts of home, and catching up on everything that didn’t get done. We have been putting in very long days nearly every day doing a multitude of tasks. We have caught up on all our trip bookkeeping; we have sorted and mended and washed things that we don’t normally wash on the road, such as our cycling gloves, our safety vests, and Camelbaks; we are repairing the damage to our equipment (read the St Augustine blog for details); and we have done a thorough maintenance routine on the bikes, with more to come.
Equipment is a big issue – Chelsea’s watch died and mine broke, so we’ve been looking for an alternative; her ThermaRest sleeping pad developed a leak in the stem which doesn’t appear to be repairable; our MSR stove developed some kinks and we can’t rely on it to work when we need it; and we ordered some items that didn’t fit, that now have to be exchanged. We have identified some holes in our systems for which we need solutions and we’ve done a huge amount of research – looking for products and doing pricing. We also need to look ahead to when we are in Mexico and Central America and South America, and continue the planning process for our changes in those areas.
As you most likely noticed, we had problems with our server, and we have spent time sorting the issues. We’ve gotten a new domain name (www.travelingroses.com), and we’ve transferred our site to another server, as well as changing it to the new domain name. We’ve then needed to go through the site carefully and change/update all of our references from Compass rose International to Traveling Roses.
We’ve caught up on all our photos, captioned them and put them online, and we will start catching up on our blogs steadily.
All of this takes an extraordinary amount of time! Each task is small, but cumulatively they seem to take forever.
Signing off from Dover NH…