Getting out of Dodge
Work. Pack. Work. Pack. A few hours of sleep a night. That about sums it up for the last few weeks. We have been putting in 15-18 hour days getting everything organized and finishing up the packing. It’s just astonishing the kinds of things we have to think about – things like when our passports expire; when our bank cards expire; getting all catalogues stopped; arranging for all bill paying – the list goes on.
New website
In addition to the packing and organizing, we did an extensive amount of work on the new website project. We had 3 or 4 meetings with our team and a number of phone sessions to get the project pulled together, and we put in a lot of time doing the proofing – checking to make sure all the details are right, checking links to see if they work properly; making sure the pages follow properly, and so on. As always with big projects like this, we ran into some design issues that needed to be thought through and decided on, so we documented all those and talked things over with the team. We are leaving feeling quite good about it, and we continue to be really excited about it.
More research
We continued to do more research for the trip also. That’s another astonishing thing about this trip – how much we need to know about all the different things we are going to be dealing with, and then finding out the easiest and most efficient and least expensive way to solve each thing. We are now looking at things like GPS units; stoves that will work with fuels internationally; camp chairs; cameras; video cameras; an international cell phone; solar chargers; lighter weight laptops; pepper spray or Dazer for dogs that come after us (Missouri and Tennessee were pretty tough last year); dry bags to keep our gear safe in the rain (we have had terrific rain almost every afternoon in Delray – with many days having severe weather alerts); another long sleeve jersey or shirt to wear; and capri-type pants for both cycling wear and for around camp. The sun and the bugs are hard to avoid, and we’ve discovered that capris would be ideal, at least for the heat phases of the trip.
We have our eyes on some products from Ground Effects from New Zealand. If you’re into cycling at all, you’ve gotta love their products. I am nearly drooling over at least a half dozen things from there. Check out their website at www.groundeffects.co.nz.
We are looking at the Starfish jerseys for the sun; the She Shell rain jackets (they have every feature I have been looking for); the Martinis (they have a detachable liner, so they can do double duty, and they are longer than regular cycling shorts – more coverage); the Hot Toddy cold weather jersey; the Tom Thumbs baggy hi-performance riding shorts (those tight spandex shorts get really miserable after 8 hours in boiling heat); and Ranchsliders (sturdy, lightweight long pants for camp that we can also use for cycling).
I am a research pro, and these products are by the best of the best. Of course we won’t really know until we put them to the road test, but they sure come a lot closer to what we’ve already identified that we need than anything else we’ve seen out there.
Our website
We have continued to update our website and to work on things to post. We now have a media page that is pretty well up-to-date (Chelsea is calling it In The News), and we’ve gotten our contributions page up and working fully at last (if you’ve been wondering how you could help us out, now you’ve got the answer – just click on the link and make a donation of any size! Every $10 makes a difference!). We hadn’t been using our merchant account since January, and they canceled us for inactivity, so that kicked us back into finding an alternative. Just that task alone took several days of research and talking things over and trying things before we got it solved.
We’ve been working on getting a gift registry going (in case you’d love to make a contribution towards one of the items we need!), but we’re not quite finished with it, and I still have a little bit left on the Nutrition section. Chelsea posted most of the other links.
Photo Gallery
We’ve gotten some pictures of Chelsea in her Burley trailer when she was only 2 years old – her dad was kind enough to get the 20+ year old 35 mm slides scanned and sent off to us, so we’ll be posting those (they are so funny!); and Nick and Tina from the Rain Barrel sent us the photos they took, so we’ll get those up as well.
Signing off from Port St Lucie, FL…
Rosemary