Myrna CG Mibus - Idyllwild

It's been a goal of mine for quite some time to actually have an "adventure coffee" bike ride. Many of my bicycling friends post pictures on Instagram with the hash tags of #coffeeoutside and #adventurecoffee and it always looked like a fun thing to do but I didn't even have a suitable pot in which to boil water let alone know the first thing about what sort of equipment I might need. So, I talked to some of my bicycling friends, most notably Michael L. and Christopher T., to ask them what I needed to get set up to make coffee outside and come up with some suitable gravel bike routes to ideal coffee break locations. I discovered that the little Esbit pocket stove my son Ryan has would work well enough for a stove. I still needed a pot and a coffee making system of some sort so I went to Milltown Cycles last week and talked to Curtis about getting set up to make coffee outside. Curtis was very helpful and I ended up purchasing a nice little GSI Outdoors Pinnacle ...

Our bike packing trip is complete and now, three weeks later, I'm finally getting around to writing up what is probably my last blog post about the trip. The first thing to address is the big question - do we want to go bike packing again?  The answer? Yes! We definitely want to do more bike packing and include camping into future adventures. Bucket list routes include (but are not limited to) the Katy Trail in Missouri and the Elroy Sparta Trail in Wisconsin. Secondly, a big Thank you is in order to the good people of Milltown Cycles, aka Milltown Premium Adventure Goods for equipping us with our bikes, our seat bags and for fielding lots and lots of questions about bike packing. Now here's our bike packing wrap-up report with info on equipment, weather, coffee and other stats! Not interested in bike packing? Well, this might be kinda dry stuff so you might want to skip down to the bottom to the Coffee section of this post and call it a day. Bikes : Owen rode ...

Today - after ordering our fat bikes in early September and waiting, mostly patiently, with great anticipation - Owen and I got to ride our fatbikes together for the first time! Owen's Mukluk 2 was in at Milltown when I picked up my Beargrease last Wednesday but he wanted to switch out the handlebar for one with more of a bend. Curtis had to order the handlebar so Owen had to wait to ride until the bar came in. So I got my fatbike on Wednesday and Owen had to wait for his. By Friday Owen's bike was ready but we couldn't pick it up until Saturday. We picked it up late Saturday but it was too late to get out on a ride. Finally today, after a busy morning at church and raking leaves this afternoon, Owen and I hopped on our fatbikes and headed out for a ride. What fun! We rode our grass taxiway (we live on an airport with a grass runway) with the kids and Rocket the dog running along with us. Then Rose, Ryan and Rocket stopped at the house and Owen and I kept going. We ro...