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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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Chelsea left in early February for what was intended to be one month in California, staying at her grandparents’ home in Lompoc, a small town just north of Santa Barbara. Both her grandparents had been ailing for some time, both in nursing homes up in the San Francisco Bay area.

Chelsea’s task was to clean out the home and get it ready to rent, since neither of the grandparents would ever be returning. She flew into the San Francisco Bay area, picked up one of her dad’s cars, and drove the three-hundred-plus miles down to Santa Barbara.

What started as an apparently straightforward task of one month turned into an exhausting but successful two and a half months sojourn. After being empty for over a year, the house needed a sizeable amount of rehab – Chelsea had no electricity for the first three or four days except in one small area of the upstairs. All electrical outlets needed to be replaced.

The front and back yards needed extensive work. The house needed painting inside and out. Plumbing leaks needed to be fixed. Pest control was needed (black widows had been having a great time). Fascia needed to be replaced and a garage door needed to be replaced. All the carpet upstairs was replaced.
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No more roommates

Back on the home front, our roommate of nearly a year and half moved out the last day of April. Tyler spends summers working in Boston anyway, and with the closing date on our house being so uncertain, he opted for saving rent money and putting his things in storage for a few months. He and Terry were out by midnight that last day.

The cats are thrilled to not have to share the house with an active little dog. We are enjoying the extra space we now have…Tyler’s bedroom is now our main packing and storage area, and Chelsea has her own room for the first time in four years. The interlude is much appreciated, especially since we’ll soon be back to sharing the very small space of a two-person tent.

We were on opposite schedules from Tyler, so that’s been another plus – not having to tiptoe around in the mornings, and not being awakened at night. We start work earlier and tend to work at odd hours now that we know we aren’t bothering anyone.

We’ve heard from Tyler a few times while he’s in Boston – he’s doing well, and will be back for work and school down here within a few weeks. We’re definitely looking forward to catching up with him and hearing all his stories.

Yard and leaf project

You may remember reading our stories from last year about the record pollen, leaves, and acorns from all the trees on our property. This spring continued the trend. By the time Chelsea got back from Lompoc we were nearly shin deep in leaves. Within the first few days we were out raking and bagging. I lost track of how many bags we went through, but it was impressive. I took us two solid days of raking and bagging to get through the worst of it.
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Thanksgiving through Easter

Holidays were notably quiet this year. We spent Thanksgiving at home with Tyler, with whom we joined forces to cook a great meal and no fewer than two pumpkin pies and three cheesecakes. Guess we had a collective sweet tooth that day.

Christmas was very quiet, too. Alex and Amanda invited us over for dinner on Christmas Eve, the last day of our Body for Life program. Alex cooked for us (he’s an amazing cook), while we got to sit around relaxing, enjoying Amanda’s Sangria. Besides the great food and drink, we loved having a chance to see the two of them by themselves and relaxed.

New Year’s Eve and Valentine’s Day slid by with nary a celebration, other than to quaff a toast to each other on New Year’s Eve.

St Pat’s Day we spent separately; Chelsea had corned beef and cabbage in Lompoc CA with her dad and uncle, while I dressed up in my Everybody Loves an Irish Girl shirt (much looser on me than last year!), had green eggs by myself for breakfast, and shared a car bomb with Alex when he came over for a short visit after lunch. A car bomb at lunch made for a relaxed afternoon for me…
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Movies

One of our favorite projects has been the copying of our somewhat extensive collection of DVDs to our much-appreciated portable hard drive. I researched the software and found a decent one, got it loaded onto Chelsea’s computer, and she’s been happily copying several movies a day for months.

We ran into a couple of stubborn ones, unfortunately our favorite movies, so yesterday Chelsea bought and downloaded a better software. We are waiting for their “chat” service to open (only nine p.m. to three a.m. our time!) before she can proceed, but we are very optimistic that our long project will be done in a matter of a few days.

Memories boxes

Most of us have a sentimental streak. We’ll save our first concert tickets, postcards from special places, napkins from a restaurant, matchbooks, little trinkets we’ve collected, love letters. As we get older we save our kids’ artwork, letters from friends and family, “breaking up” letters, old address books. Birthday cards, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day cards, old sports memorabilia – they all pile up over time.

Since I’ve moved so much, I tend to pick a box and fill it with all those little odds and ends. That’s a great idea until the boxes start multiplying. Then it’s time to sort and toss, time that never seems to come.
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Floppy disks

Remember floppy disks? Hey, I thought they were awesome when they came out; I still remember the original floppy disks that were twice the size and were really and truly floppy. But life and technology move on, and here I was, stuck with over a hundred of those pesky floppy drives and no way to access the contents.

I was in the midst of hunting for any and all documents relating to the books I’m writing and these floppy disks covered most of our years in the Czech Republic and before. How could I in good conscience just toss them out (tempting though it was)?

Back to the Web I went, searching forums for converting floppy disks. The process was easy enough, but talk about tedious. I first had to change the settings on my computer to allow the old file formats. Luckily, I still have an old “tower” that has a floppy drive in it, or I’d have had a much tougher time.

I then had to insert each of the one hundred and five floppy disks, one by one, into the drive, open it up, open up each document in each directory, then save each document into the current format after creating new directories for them.

I’ll save you the gory details of the process and jump to the final results: eighty-three new directories on my hard drive; one-hundred-ninety-two individual files; and a long walk down nineteen years of memory lane. Think tedious, emotional, time-consuming, and totally utterly rewarding.
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