The Sunny-Side Up Adventure: One Week In
Well, I’ve been on the road for one week now and I know I haven’t been very active with the blog. It’s been a little hard to sit down and compose any posts since the ranch but I have been as active on Twitter as AT&T’s coverage has allowed. My Twitter is the place to go if you want to get a feel for the trip as it happens. Short text updates and pictures get posted right from the road. I will still be doing digest posts every day or two if you want the updates to come right to your inbox. The first digest is here. Continue reading to see a good chunk of pictures from the first week. I will post some initial thoughts on the trip so far later this week while on the loneliest road (Highway 50).
1 Day
Whirlwind day today as I scrambled to get everything loaded into panniers and on the bike. My buddy Jonathan works at an engineering firm in Madera and was gracious enough to let me use one of the on-site scales to weigh my gear. I rode into town to see just how much I would hauling all the way cross-country. Total with food for a couple days and about 4 liters of water: 67 lbs! The bike and racks came in at about 35 lbs so grand total is 100 lbs give or take. I am really looking forward to climbing over Tioga Pass this weekend. My mom whipped up a delicious blueberry peach pie for dessert to put a cap on a great three months at the ranch. I am ready to do this thing! Departure is 9am tomorrow morning. Next stop: Coarsegold.
2,571 miles
That’s the computer’s best guess at the total mileage for my trek. After painstakingly tracing my day-by-day route on www.mapmyride.com, importing the tracks into Google Maps and combining them to form a single mega-map, the whole route can be viewed at http://daniel.sheeter.me/route. There’s also a very tentative schedule at http://daniel.sheeter.me/plan with links to each day’s route.
I don’t want to spend more than two months on the road so you will notice there are four segments where I have opted to take Amtrak for the sake of speed. Taking my time through Nevada, the Utah Cliffs and the Grand Canyon meant sacrificing riding through almost all of Texas and Louisiana. However, the total trip length is still more than 2,000 miles[1]. While I don’t consider this a true cross-country ride, the mileage is definitely equivalent to a coast-to-coast ride. Maybe someday I’ll have the urge to go ocean-to-ocean.
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The shortest distance between the East Coast and West Coast is 2,092 miles from Jacksonville, FL to San Diego, CA. ↩