Planning, Planning, Planning!

Wynn's update for this week of prep,
"Nothing much new is happening this week, but we continue to try to take as much of the unknown out of our trip as we can. One item we
are focusing on is trying to do our own food prep, instead of eating out each night. This should help us better control what we are taking in
nutritionally during our trip. So for the next 7 weeks, our SAG (aka Brenda) will need to try to do some food prep on an alternative source of
cooking (camp stove, small grill, etc.). Honey, we’ll try not to ruin your good cooking pots and pans."

For those unfamiliar with cycling, on a trip of this nature, it is necessary to have turn-by-turn instructions for each rider to ensure we stay en route to San Diego. So, we continue to familiarize ourselves with the route and are preparing route sheets for each of us. This past week, Colleen found a blog from a person looking for information on the same route that we are taking. He is planning this very ride in March 2014. In fact, he grabbed a lot of good information from the same website that started establishing our route for this trip. The most revealing bit of information from this blog was that there is a tunnel through the mountains on our route from Bylas, AZ to Mesa, AZ (projected day 24 of riding). One blogger stated ‘heading west you'd be coming down a 6% grade hurling towards a narrow tunnel against the guard rails with possibly some dump trucks carrying copper ore from the mines on your tail. I personally would never ride that road again until they've improved it’. Another writes ‘The Queen Creek tunnel between Globe AZ and Superior AZ is not too bad, but you will hit the entrance at pace. I found that as I entered it at pace, I quickly realized that I couldn't see the edge of the road, so I veered out as far left as I dared. It is not particularly long and you will pass through it fairly quickly. It is better to be descending than climbing through this tunnel’. Turns out that the tunnel is about a quarter of a mile, so we should be in the tunnel less than 1 minute.

(Intel such as this will help us as we go. Again, we are trying to take out as many surprises as we can from our journey. Stay tuned.)

On a personal note from Brenda: Hooray for me! My sister-in-law, Karen will be joining the SAG team for the first part of our trip. She was my college roomie at Cedarville back in the day and then married Wynn's brother so she is indeed a double blessing to me. Welcome aboard the Pony Ride, Karen. Looking forward to some good times in just a few weeks!