Myrna CG Mibus - Idyllwild

It's been ages since I've blogged about bicycling or anything else. That's mostly due to the fact that I haven't been riding my bikes much and also because my father was very sick and then passed away in early July. That said, I didn't quit blogging entirely in this time. My husband, Owen, took off in early June to ride the Tour Divide from Canada to Mexico and while he was away I posted blog entries for him at his blog Owens Epic Rides. Some of blog posts were Owen's words alone but much of the time I added content of my own as well. To start reading about Owen's Tour Divide ride, click on Arrived in Banff and start reading! Move forward through the posts by clicking on "Next -->" in the upper right hand corner of each blog post. If you are a bikepacking enthusiast, you will likely want to read the post detailing Owen's gear list. Read it at Packing for the Tour Divide . For a sneak peek at the riding conditions on the Tour Divi...

Inspired by  Pedal Hub's recent podcast , "The roundtable reunites!" in which Patrick, Amber and Gene discuss their top 5 bike moments of 2015, I decided to reflect back on 2015 and write about my five best bike moments of the year. Here are mine, in chronological order: My Vaya - post ride and still full of mud Box of Frogs  was a 60 mile bike ride adventure on gravel, tar and through the mud that I did back on June 7th. I set out to do the ride on my own but was lucky enough to ride along with my friends Kate and Victoria. Finishing that ride taught me that I can do things that seem impossible - like trek through flooded bike trails and ride all day long. The ride was long, hot, muddy, windy, rainy and wonderful! Click  HERE for my blog write up on the Box of Frogs  Adventure At the beginning of the Gandy Dancer Trail My Bikepacking Adventure  happened in early August and involved four days of biking in Wisconsin, most of it on the Gandy ...

Owen and I have done some  bike packing of the "credit card travel" variety  where we slept in hotels instead of camping. We like credit card travel but want to branch out and actually go bike packing for "real" where we carry tents and sleeping bags and all. But, since our camping experience are mostly limited to camping with our families when we were children, and our most recent tent camping experience was, let's just say, rather stressful, we know we have plenty to learn. We have many questions about bike packing from "What's a bivvy sack?" to "How do we carry all of our equipment on our bikes?" So we were super excited to learn that  Milltown Cycles  was offering a bike packing "how-to" event for beginners. The event sounded perfect for us so I signed Owen and I up right away. I also decided to bring our kids, Rose and Ryan, because they've been wanting to go camping for some time and actually have more recent campi...

About a month ago when Owen and I were on our bike packing trip , I decided I'd like to do a century ride. I've long wanted to do a century ride but have been somewhat intimidated by, well, riding 100 miles all at once. On top of that, a lot of the organized century rides are pretty challenging. But Owen came up with a century ride idea that sounded good to me so I'm going to give it a go! Owen came up with a hundred mile route that is all on bike trails, most of them crushed limestone. I'll ride my comfortable Salsa Vaya and Owen will ride his Salsa Mukluk. Owen has done a half a dozen century rides before (he completed one yesterday as part of his ten ride personal road biking challenge ) but he's never ridden a century on a fat bike. So we'll both be doing something new - I'll do my first century and Owen will do his first fat bike century. The route will be fairly easy to ride and I plan to stop a lot along the way to rest and drink coffee (I do that...

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 ...

It's coming on two weeks since Owen and I went on our bike packing trip so I figured I'd better get back to writing about day 3 as I promised to do in my last post . We started Day 3 in Luck, Wisconsin with super weather once again. Owen and I keep thinking we'll get going early but it was about 9:00 a.m. by the time we had breakfast, packed up and were on the trail again. We headed south on the Gandy Dancer Trail for St. Croix Falls, an easy 15 mile ride and found our way through some city trails to downtown St. Croix Falls. Owen wanted to see the falls, so we took some pictures then found a little coffee shop, Coffee Time, and had lunch. They were busy and we had to wait awhile for our order, but the two women working there were so sweet and the food quite good so it was well worth the wait. St. Croix Falls We wanted to stop at Cyclova , a bike shop a couple of doors down from Coffee Time, but were bummed to discover that they were closed on Tuesdays. We looked i...

We have wrapped up our four day bike adventure and, to reward ourselves, have settled in at a B&B for the evening. Since Sunday we have biked about 170 miles. The bikes worked great. Our bodies worked great. I'm a bit sore (methinks I need to lower the nose of my saddle a bit) and really can feel that my legs have been working. Other than that, though, I felt like my body was more machine than anything and once I got pedaling, I just kept on going.  I'll write more about yesterday's ride later (in short, 54 miles from Luck to St. Croix Falls back through Luck and overnight in Siren) but here's a brief recap of today... Today we slept in and got riding at 11 a.m.  Gorgeous day! Had a wonderful 30 mile ride from Siren to Shell Lake where we had lunch at The Pottery Shed (one of my favorite places). Rode to our van which was parked at our son's camp in Shell Lake, packed up the bikes and are now showered and settled in for the evening.  I'm going to eat now! He...

Well we are safe and sound in Siren, Wisconsin and have finished day 1 of our bike packing adventure.  We took off from Shell Lake just before 4 p.m. and headed west on county road B for Siren. At mile 3.5 Owen got stung by a bee or something so we stopped to check him out. Owen reacts terribly to mosquito bites so I was quite worried he'd swell up and have an allergic reaction. But he didn't, thank goodness. We biked on.  We had about a 15 mph headwind all the way to Siren. That was a bummer but we managed. The ride went well. The scenery was beautiful.  After 2 1/2 hours (27.8 miles) of biking we rolled into Siren. We're staying at a little motel, the Pinewood Motel, and we're having dinner right now at the Pour House.  My foot is a little sore. Other than that, I'm feeling strong.  Planning on 70 miles (Owen says it's all downhill) tomorrow.