It's ten years since the last TransAm and twenty since the very first, so we've naturally been thinking about finishing off the set of transams we started doing twenty years ago. The Northern Tier is the one we intend to do this time. It's the same sort of length as the previous ones, and by using up every carbon credit we've got by not flying for a decade, and picking up plastic bottles (carbon is saved by recycling them rather than making new plastic), picking up aluminium cans (carbon saving again) and keeping the heating switched onto 'low', we're OK to fly to New York and return from Seattle.
Can our knees hold out? They are twenty years older than when we started, but that isn't so very much. And the longer you leave a big ride, the more likely life will conspire to ensure you can't do it (travel insurance doesn't ever seem to go down as you get older). We are hopeful that the whole thing will be a delightful and fascinating, if rather tough sometimes, journey. The route goes over the Appalachians, round the Great Lakes, with a look in at Niagara Falls, then over the Great Plains, and rounding itself off with a clamber over the rockies - the ones near to the Canadian border. Then it is downhill to the islands of Puget Sound and finally Seattle.
The plan is to blog the whole thing here, with photos and videos. The photo here is one of Stackpole Gardens, here in Pembrokeshire. Well, it is peak ox-eye daisy season in the UK at the moment. We're doing rides to build ourselves up but with lots of planning, route checking, bike renovation, new tyres, gpx files, maps, tickets of various sorts, etc, etc... At last I have a sense that we may actually manage to do the Northern Tier - the pieces of the jigsaw are coming together, and it'll be nice to get pedalling.