Five Days with the bike and tent

Getting Ready:
Trin and I took a 5 day bike tour around Lake Champlain, so I’m very behind on blogging. We are currently on our way home and internet connection is slow from the road so I’ll post a bit and attempt to catch up over the next few days.

We prepared and over prepared over the last few weeks. Trin mapped out the route and printed the cue sheets. I started packing then rethinking everything that was packed since we would have to carry it all on our bikes. Maybe we over prepared, but this was going to be our first “real” bike tour. We left our office building around 5PM Thursday night but I continued to work on the way to Lake Champlain, till around 10PM when we lost all cell coverage. It’s the time of year budget for 2009 need to set up, this means many late nights to be able to take a few days off. Our first night we stayed in a cabin where we would park our car during the 5 days that we would be biking.

Day 1

Friday morning we loaded up the panniers and said goodbye to work and all other electrical devices. No Google for 5 days!! Well, we did take our cell phones in case of emergency, but left them powered off the entire time so that we would have batteries if we did need them, OK so I turned mine on 3 times to check the time. The first mile was all decent and a bit chilly but as soon as we started climbing the next mountain we warmed up and the weather stayed beautiful. Friday evening we stayed at Au Sable Camp grounds. We rode around the area for a bit to view the Au Sable Chasm and bought a “stuffed crust pizza” from the local store, but I think it was stuffed with particle board instead of cheese. After we got in our tents it rained a bit giving our clothes no chance to dry. To save on luggage we only brought two sets of clothes, washing them out each evening. The camp was quiet except for occasional noises from nearby camps. The honking of the camp near us as someone blew their nose a number of times and a nasal Wanka Wanka Wanka from a kid on the other side of the grounds. The only other disturbance was a skunk that kept coming over and making lots of noise near us. At one point he came right over to my side of the tent. I yelled at him to “GET”, surprisingly and thankfully he did. We slept till dawn woke us up.