Pre-Trip Planning

The Idea

The idea goes back at least 10 years, maybe longer. I read George Hawkins’ book ‘My Bicy­cle Jour­ney to the Bot­tom of the Amer­i­cas’ and said “I’d like to do that.” Return­ing to Barcelona after Christ­mas 2009 to a job I can only say I despised, I decided to look at the via­bil­ity of mak­ing the idea a real­ity so that I could see myself through the rest of the aca­d­e­mic year to 30th June, 2010. This would give me 6 months to get things organ­ised. I am a very-well organ­ised per­son, any­way, and have 25 years of exten­sive trav­el­ling expe­ri­ence behind me so I knew that this would be more than enough to get the trip organ­ised, it is impos­si­ble to plan every­thing. Erm, how wrong I was.

Organisation

Being the only teach­ing job I’ve had where I’d been under­worked, I got my daily work done and spent what­ever remained of the after­noon on the Inter­net. Spain is so back­wards in terms of pro­fes­sion­al­ism that teach­ers are con­sid­ered pub­lic ser­vants, with daily hours – mine were 08.00–16.00 on Mon­day & Fri­day and 09.00–17.00 on Tues­day, Wednes­day & Thurs­day. I also spent a lot of time at home plan­ning the trip as well. As this was the begin­ning of my first long-distance bicy­cle tour , I had a huge amount of ques­tions to be answered, including:

• Where would I go?
• How long could I real­is­ti­cally be away from a job with­out it being detri­men­tal to my career?
• Would I take my cur­rent hybrid bike or buy a tour­ing bike?
• What else would I need in addi­tion to the bike?
• How much money did I have to spend? etc.

The one thing I did know was that the school year ended on 30 June, so I would be able to leave from 1st July. I have no respon­si­bil­i­ties: rela­tion­ship, chil­dren, mort­gage or car. When I flew home from Spain I had a large & small ruck­sack full of stuff. After being charged over $3000 to ship my stuff from China back in 2005, I decided to go paper­less as most of the stuff was work-related files. I’d man­aged this by the time I left Jor­dan in July, 2008. Hav­ing also realised that I’d be mov­ing around the world for the con­sid­er­able future, at least, I got rid of all my CDs, put all of my music on iTunes and gave my books away to friends of char­ity shops – the lat­ter a big mis­take, but there’s no turn­ing back. If I win the lot­tery, I’ll go in search of the titles again and restock my once thriv­ing library of over 1000 books.

Money & Budgeting, Part 1

I had a sub­stan­tial amount of sav­ings, mainly from my teach­ing period in the Mid­dle East, which I’d left in June 2008, so being able to go off for at least sev­eral months wasn’t an issue.

The Destination

The more I looked at World Maps, thought about places I’d vis­ited and those I hadn’t, as well as the time of year I would leave, the more I thought about Cycling The Amer­i­cas, start­ing in Alaska. Ran­dom Google searches of expres­sions like ‘Cycling The Amer­i­cas’ brought me far more infor­ma­tion than I’d imag­ined existed about bicy­cle tour­ing. By the end of Jan­u­ary, I’d skim read Chris­t­ian Bomio’s trip­blog from north­ern Alaska to south­ern Argentina on Crazy Guy, the mother of all bicy­cle tour­ing web­sites. Now that push came to shove, could I really do it? From ran­dom Google searches I found a num­ber of other blogs. I scanned them, too. Many had links to other blogs, which had links to dif­fer­ent blogs  until they were the links to the same blogs. Three that used exten­sively were: Mike & Jon Logsdon’s, Tim & Cindie Travis’ and The Trav­el­ling Two’s. There were far more peo­ple doing this cycling thing than I’d ever imag­ined. I found out that Chris­t­ian Bomio had taken over 2 years to cycle from top to bot­tom, that the record time any­one had cycled it was 8.5 months, but that most peo­ple took some­where in the region of 18 months to  do it. This made com­plete sense due to the sea­sons – start­ing in Alaska in the north­ern sum­mer and fin­ish­ing in Argentina in the south­ern sum­mer, or vice versa for the trip north. At this stage, I con­cen­trated on the trip rather than money or equip­ment. I wasn’t sure if I could cycle for a month, never mind 18 of them; I’d done two 10 days trips before — one in south Wales & the other in north-eastern Spain. The more I read it seemed that most cycle trips took between a week­end and a few weeks. the time I’d taken on pre­vi­ous trips. That seemed rea­son­able so what I decided to do was to cycle around Alaska and take it from there. If it wasn’t for me, I could sell the bike and related-gear and con­tinue trav­el­ling by bus and train.

Money & Budgeting, Part 2

I’d ignored the money and bud­get­ing aspect of the trip for now. The only finan­cial cal­cu­la­tions I’d found for such a trip was by a cou­ple who’d spent 4 years cycling around the world. Every­thing – flights, bikes, equip­ment, food etc. – came to about $50,000USD. Look­ing at a ball park fig­ure for an 18-month trip, I pulled $15,000 out of the air and left it at that, as it was money I could spare (or spend it on buy­ing a prop­erty) from my sav­ings, while also going all out to save as much of my last 6 months’ salary as I could.

Getting To Alaska

Through­out Jan­u­ary I found no evi­dence of flights to Alaska from Europe. I looked at other options, which mainly involved flights into New York and Chicago, with onward con­nec­tions to Anchor­age. Prices were around £550–600 for a one-way ticket. Very rea­son­able I thought, so left it at that, and car­ried on search­ing The Inter­net for gen­eral infor­ma­tion about Alaska. As always, I started with the Lonely Planet’s Thorn Tree forum, which threw up a direct flight from Frank­furt to Anchor­age 3 times a week with Con­dor Air­lines. Their online price was €430 for a one-way flight on 4 July. I didn’t want to reserve any­thing yet, espe­cially as you have to pay for online fares in full at the time of book­ing, so I phoned Condor’s office in Madrid and paid a €50 deposit on this flight, which had a non-Internet price of €478, includ­ing taxes. I had to pay in full 6 weeks before depar­ture. It was 29 Jan­u­ary. If I decided to pull out, I’d only lose €50, but the idea of mak­ing the book­ing was to make the com­mit­ment to the trip. It also made my mind up about leav­ing my job. I only had to give them a month’s notice but had been uncom­fort­able with the unpro­fes­sional nature of the place since Day 2, when one of the bosses per­son­ally tried to bully me into doing some­thing that was out­side of my con­tract. I refused and little-by-little I’d decided to get out as soon as was viable before I was pushed. I never told any­one that I’d put the deposit down on the trip as, if I handed in my notice on 30 June I would be enti­tled to my July pay, as well. They had a rep­u­ta­tion for sack­ing peo­ple on the last day of the school year & giv­ing them much less than a month’s pay. I kept my head down and the trip plan­ning actu­ally stopped me from get­ting so bored from lack of work and made drag­ging myself there each day almost bearable.

Getting In Shape

Although never a fan of gyms, I joined the one about 2 min­utes walk from my flat in mid-January to get into train­ing for the trip. I was already cycling the almost 20km to and from work and going out for reg­u­lar week­end rides into the hills above Barcelona and up the coast north of the city. How­ever, I’d read enough about the Dal­ton High­way in north­ern Alaska to know that you didn’t get fit from rid­ing it. For the next 4.5 months I went to the gym almost every night after work – often just get­ting on one of the spin­ning bikes and putting it into the hard­est gear and ped­alling while stand­ing for between 10 and 30 min­utes. I also did some row­ing for upper body con­di­tion­ing and a few light weights.

Money & Budgeting, Part 3

I worked out that I’d start with $20,000US and that would include every­thing – the plane ticket, the bike, equip­ment, the trip itself and the return home. I wanted to return home on a cargo boat. I had never liked fly­ing and was becom­ing more aware of my car­bon foot­print. I’d actu­ally booked a one-way cargo boat from France to Venezuela after I left Jor­dan in 2008 but had can­celled it to do an MA in Edu­ca­tional Lead­er­ship & Man­age­ment back in the UK. The Logs­don Broth­ers reckon on the fol­low­ing sums for the trip: (A) Spar­tan Rider — $5,000 to $8000; (B) Mixed — $12,000 to $18,000 and © Not a Regret — $20,000+. That is one of the rea­sons I took the sum of $20,000 as a start­ing point. My remain­ing sav­ings were put in a high inter­est account and left there – I’m not inter­ested in play­ing with the stock mar­ket. The only piece of advice I’d give to any­one is that cycle tour­ing is more expen­sive than every­one I’ve met on this trip thought it would be before they set out on their first trip. If you are sav­ing for such a trip, save for a fur­ther six months, say, as you’ll be glad of the extra money in the end.

The Bike

In all of my Inter­net search­ing I’d come across Dar­ren Alff’s web­site on which he had listed the names of a num­ber of tour­ing bikes, which he’s now pro­duced into a guide. I’d nearly bought a tour­ing bike on sev­eral occa­sions before from St John’s Cycles in Eng­land but the trip hadn’t come off so I’d backed off. What I noticed from Darren’s list was a huge dif­fer­ence in price from hun­dreds of dol­lars at the bot­tom end to sev­eral thou­sand dol­lars at the top end. I have a pol­icy with almost every­thing I buy to find out the top– and bottom-end prices and then go some­where in the mid­dle. While I was weigh­ing up the pros and cons of the bikes on the list, I thought about the idea of buy­ing the bike from Alaska. Darren’s list was incred­i­bly long so, why not cut down time by see­ing what bikes were actu­ally avail­able in Anchor­age? This would save on ship­ping and it would mean that I wouldn’t have a dam­aged bike when I arrived in Anchor­age – I’ve had a bike dam­aged by an air­line before.

The Inter­net showed up 3 bike shops & REI, a shop that was to become famil­iar to me after my arrival in Anchor­age. The 2 bikes I found avail­able for between $1000 and $1500 were the Surly Long Haul Trucker and the Novara Ran­don­nee. Start­ing with the price, I looked at the pros and cons of each one. I got onto the Inter­net again and Google-searched some more, using searches of the names of each bike. It didn’t take long to find the bicy­cle tour­ing forums, nor to see that the Surly Long Haul Trucker was very highly thought of in the bicy­cling com­mu­nity. It retailed at £999 in the UK but was only $1049 at Para­mount Cycles in Anchor­age. I emailed the shop, explain­ing the trip and asked about order­ing one to col­lect all set up 5 months later – it was now late Feb­ru­ary. I heard noth­ing back for a month so emailed back. In the mean­time, I’d found a Google Group called ‘Surly Long Haul Trucker’ and a trip­blog whose rid­ers had suc­cess­fully taken the bike the 20,000+kms across The Americas.

If I could get hold of the bike, it would be the one I’d use. On the Surly LHT Google Group there is a map of peo­ple who have one of the bikes and you can meet them to test ride one. There were none in Barcelona but 3 in Lon­don, so when I went back to the UK for a visit I tested one of them out. Jon Kunesh from Para­mount Cyclesemailed me back imme­di­ately, say­ing he could order a black 2010 56” ver­sion of the bike with 26” wheels – this was the first time Surly had put 26” wheels on their bikes above a size 54”. To make sure every­thing would be ready for my arrival in Alaska, I started to look at any upgrades I might want & equip­ment I would need for the trip.

I found one arti­cle on the Inter­net from OzSoap­Box which rec­om­mended 4 upgrades to the Surly LHT; if you didn’t like the colour — the 5th rec­om­men­da­tion — you could get it sprayed:

• Bet­ter brakes.
• A Brooks saddle.
• Mud­guards / Fenders.
• Schwalbe Marathon+ Tyres.

• A black Brooks B17 Stan­dard sad­dle + a tine of Proofride.
• Marathon+ 26″ Tyres.
• Planet Bike Hard­core 45 Fenders.
• From Tek­tro Oryx Can­tilever brakes to Shi­mano XT V-brakes with Kool­stop salmon pads. I kept the Tek­tro brake levers.
• MKS Syl­van tour­ing ped­als with MKS deep steel toe clips.

I emailed this to Para­mount Cycles in Anchor­age so that Jon could keep it aside for me or order it in.

Equipment, Part 1

To start with I looked at what I had, which was quite a bit as I was already a keen cyclist and trav­eller. Going back to Crazy Guy & a num­ber of the trip blogs I’d already become famil­iar with I copied & pasted the most com­pre­hen­sive one I could find – many cycle tourists have an equip­ment sec­tion on their blogs – and divided it into what I already had and what I didn’t have. From the lat­ter, I deleted what I thought was unnec­es­sary and then, looked at sev­eral more lists until they were just repeat­ing themselves.

Darren Alff’s Bicycle Travellers’ Blueprint

I decided on a change of tack and looked for Guide­books to Cycle Tour­ing, one  of which stuck out to me, Stephen Lord’s. A new edi­tion was due out at the begin­ning of April – per­fect. How­ever, as I kept track of it, the pub­li­ca­tion date was delayed so I con­tin­ued look­ing. In one of Dar­ren Alff’s emails, I signed up a free 12-part Bicy­cle Tour­ing Mini-Course. From that, I took the plunge and spent about $15 on his e-book ‘The Bicy­cle Trav­ellers’ Blue­print’. Included with this was a copy of Bernd Fischel’s ‘Ultra­lite Bicy­cle Camp­ing’ Guide. I read them both from cover to cover, mak­ing notes as I went. By the time I’d fin­ished, I had my (pretty much) defin­i­tive equip­ment list and a num­ber of tips I’d picked up (and things I’d dis­carded) from both books.

Equipment, Part 2

With my equip­ment list ready, I had to decide whether to buy in the UK or in the USA. This some­times depended on brand names, as many North Amer­i­can prod­ucts don’t really travel The Atlantic and vice versa, so a lot of the North Amer­i­can names and shops were unfa­mil­iar to me. With pric­ing more favourable in the USA, I decided to get what I could there – it would also save me money on over­weight lug­gage – and get what I pre­ferred from the UK i.e. prod­ucts I’d used before or brand names that I liked. It quickly became obvi­ous that except for a few things I could get every­thing I wanted at eitherPara­mount Cycles or REI in Anchor­age. One of the things I bought in the UK was Ortlieb roller clas­sic front pan­niers. Although more expen­sive than in the USA, nei­ther Para­mount nor REI stocked the black ones that I wanted to match my rear pan­niers (Para­mount didn’t sell Ortlieb). I also had a back-up list of equip­ment that I wasn’t con­vinced I needed, at least, right away, such as a head­band, which I even­tu­ally bought at REI in San Fran­cisco for the warmer weather. I emailed the list to Jon in Anchor­age and left it all up to him  (see the Equip­ment Eval­u­a­tion sec­tion of this web­site for details about my equip­ment list). We dis­cussed me putting down a deposit on the bike but he waived it in the end due to prob­lems with his credit card machine.

Budgeting, Part 4

I’d spent more than a month pric­ing up equip­ment – brand against brand, spec­i­fi­ca­tions of each item, qual­ity of prod­uct and how much each item weighed. My main pri­or­ity was shop­ping around about 12 dif­fer­ent stores in Lon­don look­ing for the items I’d decided to buy in the UK. This took 2 days but was worth it from the point of view of sav­ing money – I saved around £400 over a cost of around £1300 on buy­ing the same items in dif­fer­ent shops rather than going to just one and ask­ing for a dis­count, includ­ing £75 on a tent, that was £250 every­where except in one shop, which was on the same street as 3 oth­ers. I left a few things like fleece jack­ets & rain­coats for a dif­fer­ent shop­ping trip as deci­pher­ing the infor­ma­tion and jar­gon on these was another mat­ter. It took me more trips and sev­eral more read­ings of reviews before I set­tled on what types of jack­ets I wanted – I decided to keep my old rain­coat to start with and see how it went on the trip and, even­tu­ally, bought the fleece I wanted in Anchorage.

The Trip

With every­thing in order by the end of April, I went back to research­ing the trip, par­tic­u­larly the Alaska sec­tion. I still hadn’t decided where to start from and where to go to. I found lit­tle infor­ma­tion about the 10 days through The Wilder­ness of North­ern Alaska from Dead­horse to Fair­banks, so I pieced together some form of an itin­er­ary from numer­ous sources, includ­ing Bell’s Alaska & The Mile­post. I also looked at start­ing in both Fair­banks and Anchor­age and whether I’d just cycle around Alaska, head into Canada and go either east or south from there, as both of these resources included exten­sive infor­ma­tion about The Yukon & British Columbia.

Quit My Job

At the incred­i­bly unpro­fes­sional school that is St Peter’s, Barcelona, word got to me about the same time that the man­age­ment had had a meet­ing and were going to sack me on the last day of term, as they’d done to so many for­eign­ers in the past. No rea­son would be given, nor would be nec­es­sary as I pon­dered the issue for a short while, so on 18 May, with my exter­nal exam­i­na­tion mark­ing about to start, I wrote a let­ter, gave it to the sec­re­tary and walked out, never to go back.

Further Trip Planning

This allowed me more time to plan the trip, espe­cially look­ing at the options fur­ther south of Alaska, par­tic­u­larly Canada, the USA and Mex­ico. I’d decided that, as long as I got through the first month, I could get down to south­ern Mex­ico in about 6 months. I’m not sure how much the job sit­u­a­tion had made me more deter­mined to suc­ceed, but I think it must have played some part in my deci­sion to go beyond just cycling around Alaska and see­ing how it went. Trav­el­ling through Canada and the USA would be quite expen­sive, even on a bicy­cle, but I had the time and the money to do it now, so I would. My read­ing of other blogs, past trips to Latin Amer­ica, my MA in Latin Amer­i­can Stud­ies and my flu­ency in Span­ish had piqued my inter­est more and more in trav­el­ling south of the Río Grande again. I had the mak­ings of a trip, at least enough of one to really whet my appetite.

Trip Reschedule

Quit­ting my job also allowed me to bring my depar­ture date for­ward a few weeks. A phone call to Con­dor in Madrid meant that, for an extra €50, my flight was moved from 4th July to 20th June.

Website Development

After some 25 years of trav­el­ling, I’d been think­ing about set­ting up a web­site to chron­i­cle my pre­vi­ous travel expe­ri­ences. Before I could do that, I had to remem­ber where I’d been. Through sheer mem­ory and look­ing back through writ­ten jour­nals, I started to com­pile a list of places I’d been to on each trip. Then, I dis­cov­ered PASSPORT STAMP & I started to piece together these trips lit­tle by lit­tle until 2 years later, I’d man­aged to chron­i­cle each des­ti­na­tion I’d been to. The web­site wasn’t going to be just for this cycling trip but for all of my trips so, after track­ing numer­ous options online, I plumped for 1and1 and bought their basic pack­age for £1.99 a month, know­ing that I could upgrade if I needed to. I also bought a gen­eral travel domain name and started to pack it out with basic details of my trav­el­ling his­tory. How­ever, the main aim for the time being was to cre­ate an ongo­ing blog of this trip so one of the pages I cre­ated was CURRENT TRIP. I left it at that for the time being and started to look at what oth­ers had included on their web­sites or trip­blogs. I won’t go into any more detail as you can see for your­self at either the domain name or CURRENT TRIP, hav­ing upgraded to the 1and1’s pro­fes­sional pack­age at £4.99 a month.

Sponsorship

The aim of set­ting up the web­site was for my own pur­poses and for any­one who wanted to read it, espe­cially fam­ily and friends. I there­fore did not pur­sue spon­sor­ship – this was my trip, as had all of the oth­ers been. As soon as you get involved in spon­sor­ship, the free­dom to do as you wish can be less­ened by the deal(s) you strike with who­ever you have asked for sponsorship.

Sponsoring A Charity

It seemed that the major­ity of peo­ple were work­ing in part­ner­ship with some form of char­ity. As I wasn’t sure how long I’d last or where I’d get to, I left this to one side. I didn’t want to cre­ate some huge build-up and then pack the trip in a few weeks later with my tail firmly between my legs. I’m a pretty pri­vate per­son, any­way. How­ever, I did get in touch with some char­i­ties after I’d com­pleted 3000km and never got a response – they will remain name­less, as I don’t want to bring down the name of a good cause just because one indi­vid­ual ignored my mes­sages. From my pre­lim­i­nary research, I had learned to look for the fol­low­ing indi­ca­tors when choos­ing a charity:

• How does the organ­i­sa­tion use its funds?
  • Some char­i­ties put less than 50 cents of every dol­lar they col­lect towards their pro­grammes. Besides con­tact­ing an indi­vid­ual char­ity, watch-dog sites like Char­ity Nav­i­ga­tor or Give pro­vide this type of infor­ma­tion, as well as such things as direc­tor salaries and how the orga­ni­za­tion com­pares with other sim­i­lar out­fits, how to con­tact the organization.
• Are dona­tions tax deductible?
  • This can have a huge impact on your fundrais­ing goals as many peo­ple are look­ing to make tax deductible con­tri­bu­tions, espe­cially when peo­ple are con­sid­er­ing larger dona­tions in the hun­dreds and thou­sands of dollars.
• Who is the most rel­e­vant per­son in the organ­i­sa­tion to get into con­tact with, where applicable?
• Can I organ­ise a face-to-face meet­ing with char­ity staff?
  • These last two points will help you gather the inter­est level of the organ­i­sa­tion and how much sup­port it is will­ing to offer i.e. pro­mot­ing your ride through their web­site and con­tact­ing media outlets.
• What infor­ma­tion do I need to know about my cause?

I am cur­rently work­ing on some­thing at the moment that is dear to my heart.

Is 6 Months Long Enough To Plan Such A Trip?

I am really not sure, but if it hadn’t been for me quit­ting my job 6 weeks before I was plan­ning to leave, I would prob­a­bly say that it is isn’t long enough. As you can see from the pre­vi­ous para­graph, a num­ber of things were not com­plete at the time of my depar­ture. Any work in progress would be accom­plished in good time. As far as I was con­cerned, what mat­tered was that I had a work­ing bike and the right equip­ment to get me on the road. It was only in the days lead­ing up to depar­ture that I decided to start in Dead­horse, so I booked a flight online with Alaska Air­lines from Anchor­age to Deadhorse.

Last Minute Shopping in Anchorage

I was incred­i­bly for­tu­nate to have found a won­der­ful WARMSHOWERS cou­ple to spend four days with in Anchor­age. They even lent me a car to get to Para­mount Cycles, REI, and var­i­ous super­mar­kets and chemists, among other places I spent vis­it­ing in the first few days I was there. It was a non-stop 4 days so I’d rec­om­mend spend­ing at least a cou­ple of days in the place where you land, if you have/want to take onward trans­port to your start­ing point. There are always last-minute things to do that take longer than you’d think. At the end of 4 very busy days, I thanked Jon, cycled out of the shop, but it wasn’t until I was much fur­ther down the road that I realised how bril­liant a job he’d done on the bike.