Before Blogging

Before blogging, there were bike journals. My luggage always included a camera, a decent pen, and my current bike journal. Later these journals and pictures were packed away, tucked into storage boxes and stowed on a high shelf. Over the years one storage box became two, then three. Moved from home to home, never culled, never looked at.

I ran into the cache of bike journals while doing spring cleaning. It was interesting to look through them, wallowing happily in memories of interesting moments of past tours.

• The tour where it rained so much we threw away gloves and shoes at the tour's end because they were disintegrating (yuck).
• The tour where we found ourselves treated like rock stars by locals in coastal Georgia. People actually cheered us as we pedalled by!
• The tour where we ran into days of gale force headwinds, winds so high at one point that we had to pedal furiously to keep our speed--on downhills!
• The tour where we ran into Bike Week (of the motorcycle variety).
• The many tours where we got lost.
• The tour where my rear rack broke and we pieced together a fix at a small hardware store, much to the amusement of the store's staff.
• The tour where we stopped on a whim at a beautiful beach resort hotel, without reservations, and got a fabulous ocean front room, at a super discount price, when the desk crew saw our loaded touring bikes.

Our touring bikes are dusty and unused this year. It has been too much fun riding the new road bikes. We will use the touring bikes next year. But there will be no more bike journals to store in boxes. Blogging is better.


Some of the old bike journals.