I’m up way later than I should be. In part, there’s a lot of excitement looking forward to tomorrow. Mostly, I’ve just been up packing and double-checking my supplies. I think I’m ready to go, now, logistically speaking. Psychologically… well, I’m going in the morning ready or not. No giving up until I reach the Pacific Ocean. It still freaks me out to think about. I’m about to bicycle 2,800 miles from Wisconsin (around a few detours) to the coast of Oregon.

Since I could not go without a few parting words, here I sit, typing out one more pre-launch essay while sipping on some New Belgium Fat Tire Amber Ale and listening to the latest album from Melody Gardot.

I can’t technically be claiming to ride a fat tire bike, but I’ve got 700x32s on her at the moment, and that gives me a pretty stable and balanced ride.

It was a pain in the ass packing everything up tonight, but now it’s done. I’m hauling way too much food, but that’ll be taken care of in a hurry, no doubt, and I’ll just have to watch my food purchases in the future to prevent myself from packing too much stuff around. That bike is heavy though. It’ll be an interesting ride tomorrow.

I’ve been riding around Madison a bit over this last week — not as much as I would’ve liked, but it’s still nice to put a few miles in. The intense miles are about to start. There’s some nice riding around Madison. You get some bike paths with some really cool lake views. It’s a very bike friendly town overall, I would say.

It’s also the home of Trek Bicycles. There’s a Trek retail outlet I was able to stop in at. This was very handy as I was able to get stock spare parts that are an exact match for my FX 7.3 without too much worry.

To continue my completely disjointed late-night, per-departure ramblings, this beer is quite tasty. It’s right out of the fridge, so it’s probably colder than I technically should be drinking it, but after a long night of packing up the panniers, it is quite refreshing at this temperature.

(more…)

As you’ve probably gather thus far, I’m quite big into both wine and bicycling. There is yet a third, very important passion, that I would be remiss to exclude from my writings of the summer, and that is music. My touring gear would not be complete without an mp3 player to accompany me and provide with much needed listening enjoyment along the way (only one earbud in while riding, mind you — I must keep at least one ear to the road). This begs the question, what manner of music drives me to pedal harder, better, faster, stronger.

Hmm… I may have just answered my own question. :-)

Yes, I am most certainly a fan of house music and Daft Punk (especially their first two albums). I dig the deep, soulful house sound common to the west coast (think Dubtribe Sound System). Sometimes I find myself drawn to the harder or more jackin’ sides of house music, but less often.

I am a huge fan of jazz, especially saxophonists such as Sonny Rollins and Gerry Mulligan, but I find it difficult to cycle to jazz. It’s a very introspective form of music. Jazz inspires me to stop and think, to get lost in the music itself. It thus becomes too distracting while on a ride, but is perfectly suitable at the campsite after a long day.

Blues and blues rock drives me a lot of the way. The mp3 player in questions is loaded up with many a track from Buddy Guy, John Lee Hooker and Stevie Ray Vaughan to name a few. Some 80s ska (Madness, The English Beat) for when I need to change the pace up a little bit, and a whole host of other miscellaneous tracks, artists and genres (it is, after all a 4GB mp3 player).

The artist with the biggest presence on my mp3 player, is none other than Warren Zevon. Five complete album of his (Excitable Boy, Life’ll Kill Ya, Mr Bad Example, My Ride’s Here, The Wind) are loaded up along with a several other individual tracks from other albums (tracks from albums like Transverse City, where I’m not a huge fan of the whole album, but do enjoy select nuggets). It is safe to say that Warren Zevon is my favorite artist of the moment, and more than a few songs of his will help me get through some long miles this summer.