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SubscribeMeeting two was painless. It was even so good we had another meeting today. So that marks three times our parents have met in six years. Not so bad, until you consider that all three times have been in the last year.
Weddings remain a lot of work. But the good news is that we may have found both a flower girl and a ring bearer. Details later.
| posted at: 22:00 |
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So Jillian and I need to train for this bike tour. Or at least that's what everyone keeps telling us. But training in the winter is hard, and sometimes I just don't want to make myself go climb on my trainer and pedal to nowhere in my living room. So that's why we're going to do the thousand mile challenge.
We've each challenged the other one to ride 1000 miles. Jillian and I are the type of people that compete at everything - in fact, in asking her for an example of something pointless that we compete at, she refused to give an answer, on the grounds that it might make my half of the blog better than her's. So we're hoping that a little race will motivate us.
Every day we'll log our training miles on the computer and the little bicycles at the bottom of the page will move slowly to the left. As per the somewhat amateur graphics, this was my first attempt at Inkscape, and I did almost all of it with a touchpad. So think of it as practice for later attempts.
Anybody up for challenging us to a training mile race?
| posted at: 08:21 |
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For Thanksgiving, Jillian and I are going to Lancaster to have Thanksgiving with her extended family. Since Frederick is on the way, she came up on Wednesday so that we could have an evening to hang out. After a delightful dinner we decided to walk around town a bit and get some hot chocolate. On our travels, we saw this head sitting quietly on top of a little wall. We're not sure what to make of it.
Thanksgiving with her family was delightful. I ate a ton of turkey then fell asleep. What more can you want out of a holiday? Oh, and Rock Band taught me I should not give up my day job and become a professional drummer.
At the moment, I'm camped out on the couch at her parents house, watching the Maryland basketball game, and watching the Eagles during the commercials. Tomorrow we hike into the great white north to have our parents meet for the second time.
| posted at: 20:30 |
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As mentioned under our routes, we're considering stage one of our ride to be from the Jersey Coast to Frederick, MD. This is mostly flat terrain, over areas that we're somewhat familiar with. Stage two will be to our friend Anne's house, out in Ohio. That means stage two has our first real climbing. I thought it might be time to actually pick a route.
We have a few choices for this part of the route. Our first, and original, option is to ride from Lancaster, PA to Frederick MD. From there we'd head west to Cumberland, MD. From there we'd have 250 miles to Anne's, mostly through western Maryland and southwestern Pennsylvania.
Option two would be to ride from Lancaster to Chambersburg, PA, completely skipping Maryland. From Chambersburg we'd go west on US route 30, through all the hills, until we reached Anne's sometime later. We'd be saving about 50 miles of travel this way.
Option three is the combination. Go south to Frederick, then go northwest, through Hagerstown, and into the PA hills.
My original plan was option one. Staying in Frederick is free, since we live there. While we're in Frederick we'd also have the opportunity to reevaluate our gear, changing stuff based on our somewhat improved level of experience. The ride to Cumberland would be our longest of the trip up to that point - 90 some miles. We want to check out Cumberland some time, since it's on highways, has hills, and has a real downtown area. Plus, the hills in Maryland aren't quite as high as the ones in Pennsylvania.
Option two is more interesting. The ride from Lancaster to Gettysburg isn't much fun, but once you're west of Gettysburg there's a nice, wide shoulder on good pavement. We'd get to ride through Gettysburg, where we both went to college. We'd need to ask our friend Tammy if we could stay with her family in Chambersburg, which could be awesome, since they're a lot of fun. But after we left Tammy's we'd be in for some hard riding. Our goal would be to do one hundred mile days, and do three in a row. Plus, the day after Tammy's gives us some terrible hills. The first bad one would be 1200 feet of climbing over four miles. However, we'd probably take a detour and ride through the former PA turnpike. This really, really cool project lets you ride on an abandoned four lane highway in the middle of the forest, and lets you skip a major hill by riding through it in an old tunnel. Plus, since this would be a four day route, we'd save one day's expenses.
Option three gives us the advantages of hitting Frederick, and still lets us ride through the cool tunnel. We'd also go through Mercersburg, which is a town we'd like to visit some time, and lets us see Buchanan's birthplace. We'd still hit pretty big hills, but we'd probably be able to do 80 mile days every day, which would mean we were gradually increasing our daily mileage, instead of it leaping upward suddenly, like it does in option 2.
I think that right now I'm leaning toward option two, since I think it'd be fun to ride through Gettysburg and see so much of US-30. But I'm waiting for Jillian's input. Sadly, she has a paper due Monday, so it will probably be after Thanksgiving before we make any real decision.
| posted at: 15:23 |
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When we originally decided to do this whole bike ride as a honeymoon thing we thought we had a completely original idea. Then I started reading travel journals by other bikers, looking for ideas.
It wasn't long before I came across crazyguyonabike, which hosts more than 2900 travel journals by cyclists. These journals cover every continent on the planet and some of the journals make me want to do nothing but climb on a bike with my camera and never look back. Naturally, I did a search for honeymoons. Soon I was reading Fine, It's a Honeymoon! by Sean Copans and Margaret Garnett, who rode across the southern part of the country in the spring of 2005.
Over 70 days, Sean and Margaret rode 59 days for a total of 2789 miles, averaging 11.16 mph for roughly 7 hours a day. At their best, they did about 50 miles a day. Impressive numbers. But there are some other, more interesting ones that I won't be mentioning to Jillian: they spent 1.5 days vomiting, they spent 6 days riding in the rain, and Margaret had 7 flat tires. Sean had none.
Their journal really is fascinating to read. I read it start to finish, over a period of a few days. But they took solo bikes. We're taking a tandem. I wanted to hear about how tandems are different.
For comparison, I'm hoping Jillian and I can average close to 100 miles per day, every day for a month. Sadly, faster touring = cheaper touring.
This weekend I'll start Sean and Erin Barkley's journal, as they ride for 505 days through most of Eurasia. Now, if only I could find a way to read these while I ride my trainer in the living room...
| posted at: 21:59 |
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We had our first argument as an engaged couple yesterday.
Essentially, what started as us both really wanting to talk to the other, but never having time to talk when the other was available, turned into Jillian getting very frustrated with the blog and worried about her ability to ride across the country.
The not having time argument was stupid. I tried to make time by talking to her while programming the assignment for the next day's programming class. I wasn't really paying attention. Totally my fault. We acknowledged that pretty quick, and moved on.
But that turned into some other frustrations. First, some back story about the blog. When I first set the blog up, I was using Blosxom. But I felt that the development community wasn't very active, and that many of the plugins weren't being maintained. But I loved the way we had complete flexibility over appearance, could configure absolutely anything, and could do multiple blogs on the same install. So I set this blog up using Pyblosxom, which is just Blosxom rewritten in Python. I spent quite a bit of time getting the template right (flavour, in Blosxom speak), and quite a bit of time making sure we could easily add comments and such. There was only one catch.
When you load a page here, Pyblosxom does a multistep process to assemble the webpage for you. First it loads the header. Then it determines which entries should be displayed, and loads each of those, then it loads the footer. Finally it writes that whole mess of stuff out and you see the page. This is a really flexible system. But it means that each entry needs to be written in HTML.
Now, I've been writing HTML since version 2.0, way back when I was in 5th grade. It's totally natural for me to put my paragraphs inside <p></p> tags. Sometimes when my class is talking, I just want to put </talking> up on my whiteboard and have them magically stop. Aside from a brief foray in college, Jillian has never used HTML.
I didn't think this would be too hard. After all, she wouldn't need to learn all the tags. She wouldn't need to learn css. She'd never need to tell anyone what our DOCTYPE is. But she would need to wrap paragraphs in paragraph tags, properly use link tags, and use image tags for pictures. But I wrote some CSS to make life easy. For example, all she needs to do is add class="pictureLeft" and the picture magically floats on the left side of the screen, at 30% the width of your browser window.
But we've discovered that we write things differently. I'm a computer science person. I write an entry, reread it once, post it, and then spend some time making sure everything looks exactly the way I want. Jillian is an English person. She writes an entry, edits it four or five times, and then posts. She wants to always worry about content, and never about presentation.
She got the link tags down, but the image tags are a little harder. Hosting images on our server costs us money (though not much, thanks to our hosting provider). To save a little money, we're hosting images on flickr. I had shown Jillian how to use image tags with locally hosted images, but never with flickr images. She needed an example that used an image stored on Flickr. So she emailed me. I emailed back that she had an example, not realizing that she wouldn't be able to translate the relative url in the example I had given her for local images to the absolute url that Flickr uses.
We resolved that a little later. I've since sent her an updated cheat sheet. I think the fundamental problem is that she doesn't want to go through all the little steps - resizing the images, uploading them, getting the url from Flickr, putting the tag in the post, uploading the post, and verifying that everything works. Hopefully some of these problems will be resolved when we're posting from the same computer. Gnome on Ubuntu makes it very easy to resize and post photos to Flickr. It's a two step process that doesn't even require opening a browser window. But until we're in the same place, that won't happen.
So on to the second, much less technical part. I think Jillian finally realized that the country is big. Not that she didn't know, already, but it finally hit her that crossing it on a bicycle takes a lot of time. We're looking at something like 3300 miles. Jillian has never done more than thirty-some in a day. We're looking at more than three times that, every day, for 40 days. You don't realize how monumental of a task that is until you really think about it. It seems impossible.
I've done long rides before. As a challenge to a complete stranger I met on an MS Bike ride, I rode from Gettysburg, PA to Lawton, PA, just 23 miles short of my goal (I quit due to safety concerns). I didn't ever think about the entire distance - 232 miles is too long to think about. I thought first about riding to Harrisburg, and trying to make it by dawn (I did, and the sun rising over the river was beautiful). Then I thought about making it to Sunbury before my support car did (I did), and then I thought about making it to Bloomsburg before my support card did (I didn't). The ride after that was easy, mentally. I was more than half way. All I needed to do was think about reaching the next major landmark. I never thought about the entire distance, never even thought about how far I'd come (except when my cheap cyclocomputer stopped registering new miles because it couldn't go more than 12 hours without a reset). I don't think Jillian has learned this trick yet, and it is a hard trick to learn. For this ride, I'm only thinking about the three days between the New Jersey coast and Frederick. None of the rides are long. All are fairly flat. But if we make it through that shakedown stage, then maybe we can think about riding to Ohio.
Anyway, Jillian was worried that we wouldn't be able to make it. And she has a point. While she is a ridiculously amazing athlete, she's not an endurance athlete. She doesn't have a lot of time on the bike. But she does think that this is a wonderful idea, and she does think that this ride will improve our marriage. Her most serious concern was that she'd get injured (remember, her nickname is Stitch). Injury is a distinct possibility, and there was nothing to do but agree to have a discussion about the circumstances under which we'd actually quit the ride. And to reassure her that a properly fit bicycle doesn't usually cause injuries. And to remind her that she'll probably be the stoker for most of the ride (the stoker is the rider on a tandem who isn't steering). The advantage of being a stoker on a Pino is that you get a rather comfortable recumbent seat.
So anyway, it was a minor argument. It wasn't even about the wedding. But it was definitely helpful to vent some concerns about the ride.
| posted at: 17:00 |
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People keep asking me how much is done, so I thought I'd share.
The church is booked. The reception location is booked. A caterer is hired. A photographer has been hired. Jillian has bought her dress. We've registered for a total of 60 gifts.
And that's it. There must be a billion things left to do, and I can't quite keep all of them in my head. And don't even get me started on the honeymoon - I only have the route mapped out as far west as Frederick, MD. That's just 2,975 miles short of the ultimate goal, give or take 200 miles. Plus, we haven't even purchased the bike yet.
After I took her to see West Side Story on Saturday, I did get Jillian to agree to ride a series of progressively longer charity events. So hopefully this spring we'll start with a half metric and gradually move up to a full century.
Too much to do, not enough time.
| posted at: 16:25 |
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