Leg 1, Ride 6: Kenosha to Lake Bluff
State #2! A short ride today: just 26 miles to Lake Bluff, Illinois.
There's not much at all in Lake Bluff, at least not near our motel, so we spent the entire morning lingering in Kenosha.
Leg 1, Ride 5: Milwaukee to Kenosha
Well, today was our first tough weather day of the trip. We awoke to a frost advisory and a temperature of 38F. We started from Downtown Milwaukee with a whipping headwind coming from the south. Then the rain started. Near the end of the day, as we approached Kenosha, the same story: cold, brisk headwind with rain.
But, the cold was no match for my secret weapon: dish gloves. The gloves, sadly, prevented me from taking pictures for the foul weather parts.
Leg 1 Interlude: Milwaukee
We took a day off from riding today. A chance to rest our legs, and also to spend some time in Milwaukee. Tomorrow, we're off to Kenosha.
Milwaukee is a super cool, quirky, hugely-underrated city. Easily one of the top 20 places in the USA, probably top 10. If you've never been here, you should come.
Leg 1, Ride 4: Waukesha to Milwaukee
Huge breakfast today, and a short ride. But, it doesn't matter -- I'm hungry the second I step off the bike.
Some minor issues on the ride today. The New Berlin Trail was "closed" until November. As is custom for bike trail construction, "closed" means "there's zero active work being done, and you can totally get through, but we put up closed signs anyhow which everybody will ignore".
Leg 1, Ride 3: Jefferson to Waukesha
We started today with some minor hills, then we had an unpaved rural trail, which changed to a paved suburban trail, and we finished on city streets. Basically, the same thing as yesterday, but in reverse order.
Leg 1, Ride 2: Madison to Jefferson
Today was our first "real" ride, long enough that we broke a sweat and stopped to rest a few times. 36 miles in 3 hours and 22 minutes. Which is certainly not fast, but not awful considering that we were on a dirt path most of the day.
We rode this same path in 2011 when we did a Minneapolis-to-Milwaukee ride. On that trip, we learned that biting horseflies can fly about 13 miles per hour. This year, no horseflies.
Although it started off a bit chilly, this ended up being a beautiful day for riding. We just barely avoided some rain that passed a couple miles south of us, and then it was sunny and mild the rest of the day.
Leg 1, Ride 1: Madison to Madison
Hey, it's our first riding day of the trip! A real arduous slog today: almost 14 whole miles!
We kept today's ride really short because it's our first road bike ride of the entire year, and because we wanted to have plenty of time to deal with any problems we might discover once we actually started pedalling.
Transport/Assembly Day
We're in Madison! (Thanks to the help of 1 trolley, 1 subway train, 1 shuttle bus, 1 airplane, 1 people mover, 1 coach bus, and 2 cars)
Today, our first and only priority was to re-assemble our bikes -- if there were any damage in shipping (or if we forgot to include a part or two), we wanted to make sure we took care of that immediately.
Packing Day
We won't actually leave for a few more days, and we won't start pedaling for another week, but today was packing day.
Just a quick sanity check to see if all of our stuff will really fit into our bags. This was a success.
Trip Overview / Shipping Day
In a couple of weeks, we'll be heading out on a perhaps-foolhardy bike trip. This post serves as an overview of what we're planning, and as a test of the blogging setup we plan to use to share our progress as we go. We'll hopefully be posting lots of pictures along the way (and some words, too).
