Our trip has been going incredibly smoothly so far, in large part due to careful planning over the months leading up to it. We not only reserved all of our hotels well in advance, but also chose every road that we'll take on the 3800 mile trip. Road choice is important, since we not only want to be on secondary roads (off the interstates and most other highways), but also to be on paved roads since the skinny tires (23 mm) on our road bikes do very poorly on dirt roads. We tried several methods to determine whether a road is paved or not, but found that the most reliable method is to zoom in on Google Maps satellite view and check whether there's a painted line down the middle of the road: if it's there, we know the road is paved, and if not, we can't be sure and thus we avoid the road. Once we made our road selection (which we did a couple of months prior to the trip), we created a route on Mapsource (the computer mapping program that accompanies our Garmin GPS unit) and transferred the route to the GPS unit. With the GPS on our handlebars, we just go wherever it directs us. In 3 weeks, and ~1000 miles, of biking so far, we haven't been on a single unpaved road.
Tuesday was another "double-duty" bike day. We started out in Ritzville, WA and had originally planned to go 55 miles to Cheney, WA, then have a short bike day to Spokane on Wednesday to get there in time for a teaching session starting at noon. Our legs are feeling really strong by now, so we did the entire 72 mile ride from Ritzville to Spokane on Tuesday. We even got to Spokane early enough for Peter to get a haircut (to look decent for Wednesday's teaching session) and then to go to an upscale restaurant for dinner.
The Google maps satellite view of one of the roads we cycled on today.
When we planned our route months ago, we saw the dashed
line down the middle of the road, confirming that it's paved.
A roadside stop, with curious onlookers
Out for a wonderful salmon dinner in Spokane
