Well, we started to have some butterflies in our stomach with a week or so before we fly from the comfort of our home to New Zealand to start a six month cycling trip on a tandem. Jenny and I retired from work last June. Over the past several years, Jenny slowly got sold on the idea of a long distance cycling adventure. The selling job was a bit more like Jenny’s pay-back following an agreement reached early in our relationship.
Background
Back in the early 2000, before Jenny and I started our relationship, I had quietly started to ponder a 6-8 month cycling trip to South Asia. As our relationship quickly blossomed, and before my cycling plan evolved too far, Jenny and I had a long conversation in a car parked in front of our local MEC store. She convinced me to put this project on hold until later, until the kids grew up, and in return, she promised to join me in a future cycling adventure.
Over the past few years, Jenny and I have searched for and read travelogues from long distance touring cyclists. Let’s be clear that our proposed six month cycling journey is a very modest one compared to many other cyclists who tackle round the world adventures – stretching well over a year and beyond.
About the blog
Throughout our previous travels, we’ve made it a practice of writing a travel journal and snapping (countless!) pictures. Over the years, we’ve come to appreciate these travel artifacts as priceless souvenirs. After discovering, during a 2015 trip to the UK, that blogging software packages, such as WordPress, were used by most modern travelers to record and share their travel adventures, we reluctantly gave up on the idea of developing our own on-line travel journal. We spent a few months getting acquainted with WordPress and its wide range of plug-in offering. We field-tested our travel blog during our 2016 and 2017 summer trips to Europe.
The preparation
Since we enjoyed, for the past nine years, cycling to work on our Burley Samba tandem, it was easy to agree that our cycling adventure should be done on a tandem.
In late 2016, we placed an order for a new tandem for our upcoming trip. Since then, we’ve spent a fair amount of time reading about long-distance touring equipment and ultimately making our purchasing choices. As often shared by other touring cyclists, our list of equipment with individual item weight is provided here.
We field-tested our new tandem, trailer and equipment over two trial outings this past summer. Our first trial involved a 40kms ride to a provincial park with a two night camping stay. The tandem and the equipment performed very well. The cycling experience was very enjoyable but we learned we needed to improve on our equipment/clothes packing.
The focus of our second trial was more to gage our endurance level. We cycled 82kms to my brother’s cottage and cycling back after a day of rest. Again, the successful experience boosted our level of comfort with the loaded tandem.
In addition to our cycling preparation, Jenny has worked out at the gym for the past ten months. Needless to say, all of this preparation is the real easy part of our cycling trip as we expect to be challenged a lot more through the elements of weather, road condition and more.
The rough plan
Early in our route planning stage, we thought of starting our cycle adventure from an exotic location such as Hawaii but after some research we quickly dismissed this location as not particular bike friendly nor easy to island hop with a tandem.
Instead, we opted to follow a route from the Tandem Turners cycling adventure which started in New Zealand.
On overview of our proposed route for New Zealand (~2,800kms) and Australia (~5,000kms) is found here.
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Next post from down under!
