VIDEO: Frito Pie Ride!

We’ve been lucky to make some great friends while in Portland. For us, the toughest thing about traveling is rarely the hills and wind (ok, maybe the wind), but saying goodbye. This video is just a small glimpse into the great fun we’ve had with our friends here in Portlandia.

If you’re excited for our Big Adventure. Small Wheels. trip and support our goal to invigorate bike and train travel, consider making a donation to allow us to go further and create inspiring videos along the way.

Rough Cut: Rob Sadowsky from the BTA

As we begin to meet and interview bicycle and transit advocates, I’m going to post short clips on our Facebook and webpage. If you have any suggestions for people we should get in touch with, email us! In this interview, we speak with Rob Sadowsky, the executive director of the BTA in Portland, OR. We talk about the importance of a coalition between transit and cyclists and about traveling with bikes on Amtrak.

If you’re excited for our Big Adventure. Small Wheels. trip and support our goal to invigorate bike and train travel, consider making a donation to allow us to go further and create inspiring videos along the way.

VIDEO REVIEW: REI Compression Stuff Sack

Quick video review of the REI Compression Stuff Sack. The one shown in the video is the 11L and fits our clothes (not including outer layers like jacket and pants).

If you enjoyed the review, consider purchasing a stuff sack through our affiliate link and support our trip!

More videos!

If you’re a fan on our Facebook Page or follow us on Twitter, you’ve probably seen these videos already. We’re working hard to make some great new content for our next adventure. Not all of it gets posted right away on the website, so if you want to see things hot off the presses, join the Facebook Page. Check out our latest videos!

Packing Up. Again.
In this video, we go through the strange ritual of putting things in boxes for a second time. It gets easier in some ways, but harder in others.

Visiting Corvallis with Bromptons and the Amtrak Bus
In this video, we take a trip to Corvallis, Laura’s hometown, to do a presentation. It is a small trip down memory lane for her and a small multi-modal adventure with the Bromptons and the Amtrak bus.

If you’re excited for our Big Adventure. Small Wheels. trip and support our goal to invigorate bike and train travel, consider making a donation to allow us to go further and create inspiring videos along the way.

6 More Days!

Yesterday was an emotional day for us. Laura’s family came by to see us one last time before we take off on our next trip (this Sunday!). It was also the day our boxes of stuff went away. Clothes, papers, some of my camera gear, Laura’s jewelry, our old panniers, my trusty orange laptop and, of course, our Surly Long Haul Truckers from our previous trip.

We know things are just things, but I’ll admit I was sad to see some of it go. Not because I was attached to any particular possession, but because they were touchstones of our last trip and our stay in Portland. There is no real value in a plastic Mardis Gras rubber ducky, but when I see it I think of eating crawfish from a bucket with our hosts in Shreveport, Louisiana. These things represent a past that we’re shedding off in order to move toward the unknown future. There is something symbolic, atleast for me, about putting things in boxes to be shelved away. There’s such a strange finality to it.

Stranger still is that we’ve done this before two years ago. The packing, sorting and boxing of our little lives. It was easier this time around, but it is still met with a bit of trepidation. As we look around, our apartment is beginning to feel less like a home and more just a place to just go to sleep. The shift is subtle but irreversible. Home is never a collection of kitchen appliances and furniture, it is your family and your friends that you surround yourself with. We’ve been fortunate to meet good people while in Portland who have helped us and who have welcomed us. They’ve made this wet Pacific Northwest city home for us in the few months we’ve stayed here.

The road’s siren song calls again, but this time the tune is quite different. We’re a little older, a little wiser perhaps about long term travel. We know what travel promises, and which promises it can keep. But we also know life on the road is about surprises and serendipity and we are curious about what lies around the next bend of the road.

One Last Push

We have six more days in Portland. Six more days to see our friends. Six more days to prepare and ready ourselves before pedaling forth once again. We also only have 6 more days in our IndieGoGo fundraising campaign to reach our goal! We are about a third of the way there but still have quite a bit to go.

We want to thank everyone that has so generously donated already and who has helped spread the word.

Our mission is simple – to share our vision of traveling by bike and train across the United States, through words, photos and film. We want to create a tangible vision through our writing and videos so that rail and bike advocates can see what we see. No one, to our knowledge, has really explored the possibilities of bike and train travel and what it can do for rural economies near train lines or what it could mean for new forms of adventure tourism.

Your donations will assist us with the cost of food and train tickets. We reached out to Amtrak many months ago to be a partner, but they chose not to join us. Despite that, we believe strongly in the possibilities of bike and train travel. I think our vision will be made strikingly relevant this spring and summer, as the price of gas will put the crimp on the American automobile road trip and airline travel. People will look for new ways to travel and they will look to the train. As train use gets more impacted, we feel that it may get harder and harder to bring bicycles on board. We want to inspire cyclists across the country to share our vision of travel by bike and train and get them involved now with the conversation about trains and our transportation future!

If you have enjoyed our stories, photos and videos from the road over the last two years, or if you want to assist us with our new mission of sharing our vision of bikes and trains across the country, consider donating to our fundraiser. It closes in six days, so spread the word!

Donate to our PathLessPedaled – IndieGoGo Fundraiser campaign.

Build It. Bike It. Be a Part of It!

Our friends at Adventure Cycling are doing good work. Lets help them out! We’re really excited to finally meet them this Spring. Look for a video of our visit in the coming weeks!

Donate $10 today to support the creation of a national network of bicycle routes: the U.S. Bicycle Route System (USBRS), a visionary project that will be similar to the national and international systems blossoming across the globe, such as Euro Vélo. The routes will connect cyclists across the U.S. with cities, transportation hubs, scenic and historic destinations through existing (and new) infrastructure; routes will be numbered, mapped, and officially recognized by state and federal government agencies.

30 states are already working to implement U.S. Bike Routes — donate today! http://www.razoo.com/p/BuildTheUSBRS2011.

Want to help spread the word about this campaign?
http://www.adventurecycling.org/beapartofit

5 Easy Ways to be a Bike-Friendly Business

UPDATED to include a quick note about 24hrBikeShop.

In our travels, we’ve eaten at numerous restaurants, visited museums, and stayed at a variety of accommodations (from campgrounds and homestays, to hostels, motels and the occasional hotel). One of the first things we key in on is the relative bike-friendliness of any establishment. Being in Portland the last few months, we’ve been spoiled with the amount of bicycle accommodations local businesses have to offer – bars with indoor bike parking, streets with bike corrals, etc. We completely understand that many establishments in other parts of the country don’t have the resources or manpower to devote to turn their business into a full blown Portland experience. However, there are many relatively easy and inexpensive ways to lure cyclists in and have them talk about the bikeyness of your business.

5. Have a basic flat repair kit / pump handy.
As bike tourists, one of our most common expendables is tubes and tires. Flats are generally a small nagging problem in the city, but can transform into a big problem when you are in a small town in the middle of nowhere. We’ve been to areas with nary a bike shop for days. If you’re a business in a small town, one easy thing to do is carry a basic patch kit for cyclists. If you want to go a little further, consider a handful of spare tubes in varying sizes. If you want to really get a cyclists attention, get a floor pump. I was having coffee at Cellar Door in Portland a few days ago and noticed they had very non-chalantly placed a floor pump in the corner. I didn’t have to use it, nor did I see anyone else use it, but the fact that it was there stuck in my head. It said to me, “we’re going to invest a little money to make this place friendlier for cyclists.” They probably didn’t intend the floor pump to be a clever viral marketing campaign (or maybe they did), but since seeing it I’ve told my friends about Cellar Door and now I’m telling you.

In the small town of Saxapahaw in North Carolina, we passed a great little general store with an amazing bakery that was a good ride from the closest town with a bike shop. It happened to be a popular stop with roadies from Chapel Hill and Carborro. In order to help out the cyclists that were stopping by every weekend for breakfast, they had an ingenious thing called a BikeBox! Think of it as an all-in-one “starter kit” to be a bike friendly business. It contained tubes, patches, energy gels, etc., You can even customize the contents of the box to better match the type of cyclists riding pass your town. If you have a BikeBox it also gets listed on their website. These would be perfect for those tiny towns along Adventure Cycling routes without bike shops that want to help out cyclists!

4. Have some maps handy.
Next to tubes and beer, the lifeblood of touring cyclists is a good map. If you are in a town that is fortunate enough to have an official bike map, keep one handy. Even if you don’t have one, but there is a strong cycling community, ask them to compile some great riding routes and create a DIY bike guide. If you are a hotel or motel that sees a lot of traveling cyclists pass through, there is a good chance you might be on an Adventure Cycling Association route. If you totally want to blow the mind of a touring cyclist, ask them if they need the next section of map for their route. It will no doubt stun them into a state of eternal gratitude. We had this experience in Comstock, Texas. Comstock is essentially a street with a handful of buildings. By the time we got there, we were out of food and beat up after battling headwinds the last three days. We had heard about a motel but could find no listing on Google Maps. Sure enough, it was there, and we were grateful. What totally blew us away was how friendly the couple was that owned it. They recently purchased the property and welcomed touring cyclists with open arms. They even had some Adventure Cycling materials in the lobby! When we arrived, all the markets were closed and had no food left. One of the workers at the lobby ended up driving home and made us some microwave popcorn to tide us over until the next day.

3. Offer u-locks or bike check-in
We rode 10,000 miles around the US with no U-lock. We still remember telling this to folks at our presentation in Brooklyn and everyone in the room flipped out and immediately tweeted it! What we’ve discovered is that, about 95% of the time, your bike will be fine. Out in the middle of the country, we’ve had no problems. Our only time of concern is in big cities. If you have a bike shop or run a motel and see a good number of bike tourists, offer them a u-lock to use for their stay. We usually spend a day or two in big cities to explore and bolster the local economy. By offering a cyclist a u-lock, they are more apt to feel comfortable riding around town to eat at a restaurant, buy some coffee or buy something from your shop or stay in your motel. Another possibility is to offer a cyclist a secure backroom where they can leave their bike while they explore. Laura recently met some friends at a the Doubletree hotel bar and the concierge checked her Brompton in the secure luggage check. It was a simple act, it didn’t cost them any money to do that and now we’ve just told thousands of people.

2. Roll-in to the Rooms
There is nothing more irksome than checking in somewhere after a long day of riding and then being told that we can’t bring our bikes into the room, but “there is a perfectly safe place to lock them in the back of the building by the dumpster.” No thanks. For the touring cyclist, the bike is everything. There is no bicycle touring without the bicycle. If you run a place with sleeping accommodations, know that a bike tourist will feel more comfortable with the bike in the room with them. We understand that you’re worried about the carpet and floors, but they don’t do any more harm than a wheelchair or a stroller. You wouldn’t ask someone in a wheelchair to park their chair behind the dumpster would you? Ironically, some of the nicest places we’ve stayed have allowed us to bring our bikes into the room while some of the dumpier sticky carpet motels have scoffed at the notion.

Some notable examples were the El Capitan in Van Horn, TX; the Hotel Paisano in Marfa; and The Gage in Marathon, TX. You’ll notice that the three places we mentioned are out in far west Texas, perhaps the last place you would expect hospitality for the touring cyclist. However, each of these establishments were highly hospitable and let us have our bikes in the room. The El Capitan in Van Horn (on the path of the ACA Southern Tier route) even had an oversized elevator that made it possible to fit two fully loaded LHTs at once.

1. Have the Right Attitude
As a business, you could do one of these things, all of these things or none of these things. Regardless of what you choose, having the right attitude is the most important. Bicycle tourists, admittedly, are a strange lot. We are modern wayward travelers, looking for meaning, adventure and fun, who choose to do it by bicycle, just as others may choose an RV, motorcycle or car. Because we are constantly out in the elements, alternating between sweating and stuffing our faces full of food, we are eternally grateful for the small niceties that businesses and small towns may offer us. We remember acts of kindness and spread the word. Bicycle tourists and cyclists, in general, are an extremely wired and connected community. News travels fast. That motel we mentioned in Comstock? We heard about it days in advance through word of mouth from passing cyclists (now we’ve broadcast it to a wider audience). If you welcome us with open arms, we’ll tell everyone we know.

One of the most standout experiences we had was at a small private campground in Tennessee, off of the Natchez Trace, called Fall Hollow. It was a long day of hills and we pulled in, tired and famished. The place looked deserted but we stuck our heads into the campground office and restaurant. The two owners were getting ready for the evening shift. All the food was still put away and none of the burners were on. They saw us and started chatting us up. They offered us some hamburgers (my Kryptonite) even though they weren’t officially open. To someone half-deranged from baking in the sun and famished from going up and down hills all day, it was a godsend and it was one of the most beautiful and perfect hamburgers of my entire life. They didn’t have to do anything for us. They could have told us they there were going to open in three hours and just have us wait. But they saw us as fellow humans, not freaks on a bike, and made a connection.

Few thoughts about hamburgers bring tears to my eyes. Yet, when we look back at the kind hosts at Fall Hollow, who fed us when the kitchen was closed, it’s hard not to get a warm and fuzzy feeling inside.

Becoming a bicycle-friendly business doesn’t have to require a lot of money. Often it takes only small actions and a little understanding to help out a touring cyclist. These small accommodations often go a long way and spread quickly in bikey circles.

If you’re excited for our Big Adventure. Small Wheels. trip and support our goal to invigorate bike and train travel, consider making a donation to allow us to go further and create inspiring videos along the way.

VIDEO: Breakfast on the Bridges

As our time winds down in Portland (we leave in 13 days!!!), we’re trying to indulge in all the bikey-ness we can. Here’s a video I shot on our last Breakfast on the Bridges in town. It is bittersweet getting ready to go. We’ve had a great time in PDX and are a little sad that we’re leaving now that the weather is getting good, but the road calls once again!

If you’re excited for our Big Adventure. Small Wheels. trip and support our goal to invigorate bike and train travel, consider making a donation to allow us to go further and create inspiring videos along the way.