Unlike for our previous cycling trip to South Korean/Japan, this trip’s preparation was quite effortless.

Travel logistics

We managed to re-use the same planning and logistic tools we developed and tweaked over the years. After completing our broad route planning with Google Maps, we leveraged again our three travel spreadsheets: (1) – itinerary planning, (2) – expense tracking and (3) – packing list/steps. This time around, we particularly appreciated our detailed packing list spreadsheet.

Getting there

We bought our airline tickets about two months before our planned departure. We opted to only secure our airfare and hotel nights for the the start of our cycling route (Warsaw, Poland) .

Blog

Last year’s significant blog upgrade proved reliable throughout out our South Korea/Japan cycling trip. Hence, we did not have to make any changes to our platform. We still left the development of a random picture plugin on our to-do list.

Tandem

We had started to notice some wear of our timing chainrings. It was only when we compared them to new ones that we realized how much we had worn them off after 16,000kms of loaded cycling travel since 2017 – when we retired.

Unlike our difficulties in finding a bicycle box in Japan, we easily managed to collect three bicycle boxes from various bicycle shops in town during the month of March. We actually re-sized our selected box to ensure it complied with the most stringent box size specifications of our air carriers.

Health check

As part of our travel insurance coverage, we are required to have completed a health check within the past two years. It seems like this topic has increasingly required our attention.