Monday is rearing its ugly head closer as the week is coming to an end. Most of you are dreading Monday, because, of course, it’s the start of another work week. But Eric and I are not dreading this Monday, and we will not be wearing real pants… whatever those are.
THIS MONDAY IS TAKE OFF! AHHHHHHHH!
But before I talk about how excited and nervous I am that Monday is almost here, I want to talk about this past weekend. Eric and I went on a wonderful bike ride with all of our gear.
Eric’s orange troll is weighing in at 95lbs, and my purple troll is 88lbs. We obviously don’t care about grams.
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This weekend trip we took was to really try out all the weight, and setup of the gear. We rode 134 miles in two days, and there was only one down side to the entire weekend…
Someone shit in the sink.
Eric had to share this.
We had a great ride into Xenia, we stayed the night in a small park in Spring Valley, but the next morning at our first stop, this is what he got. Hah! I think it’s hilarious, but poopy he didn’t get to wash his hands.
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Okay, now for the ride. We started first by deciding who’s carrying what, and how much weight we would be putting into the rear panniers and fronts.
As you can see, we had a lot of decision making to do. 🙂
I swear Eric wasn’t carrying that much more than me. It is the fact that his bike is actually heavier that made his weight more. But it all worked out. We really figured out perfectly how the setup will be. I decided after the ride that we will need to label each bag with what’s inside so we don’t get confused and waste time pulling everything out.
There’s a lot to go through for just sunscreen. 😛
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So, our ride is beginning, and it’s just perfect. The day is beautiful, we’re meeting some wonderful people, it’s just what we needed. Now, it sounds like I’m going to tell you that disaster struck… it didn’t. I promise. I mean, there were some things that happened, that will happen on the real trip, but it’s all for preparation, so we are happy it happened!
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I’d like to say right now that we are so grateful to the people who have been donating to our trip. One of our slight mishaps, but isn’t really a big one because now we know… is food. We will be needing to have so many easy and quick types of foods to eat while riding. We were stopping every hour to stretch and eat a small power bar or gel. That stuff gets expensive, and we will be eating a lot of it. So, thank you for the financial support because it will be going towards our fuel!
ALSO, HUGE SHOUTOUT to PocketFuelNaturals for the awesome discount on their vegan pocket energy sources. I love all the nut butter blends so much more than gels, and they provide sustained energy which is needed during this ride. These are much lighter to carry than huge bags of almonds or hazelnuts.
(Clicking the picture will take you to their Facebook page, clicking their name in the paragraph will take you to their products’ website.)
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We cannot wait to have this kind of view for the next two-three months. It’s going to be such an adventure. This was just another break we were taking. We were talking about if we had a Go-Pro, it’d be cool to put in videos of the ride, but sadly, that’s not in the budget. But perhaps the next great adventure we take. 🙂
My bad, the sun was totally winning. Oh well, I still like this photo. This was taken right before we really got on the Loveland Bike Trail. We just wanted to be cute for a second.
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Sleep, sleep, it is time for sleep!
This was our beautiful campsite, complete with basketball courts and picnic tables. This was the best place we could find to stay the night. Eric had gone into town to get water for the next morning, and luckily they let him know that we were good to stay there. This made us think about sleeping during the trip a lot. This is why we want everyone reading this to take a good look at our map, and let your friends and family know that if anyone wants to give up their side, back, front yard for a night for us, THAT WOULD BE AMAZING!
Sleeping in the park went great, but it won’t always be that smooth during the trip. There will definitely be times where we will have to bushwhack through some weeds to find a place to sleep. So, if anyone can help out during the ride, let us know! Also, I love cooking, I’ll make you dinner 😉
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Our weekend trip was a success. It is almost unreal that we are about to leave on a bicycling trip across the country. It is a bit overwhelming considering now people are donating to us! It’s getting crazy!
If people are still interested in donating, we will always have the donation button like this 
on the right side of the posts, and the donation page on the homepage of the blog. We also created a photo stream for when we don’t have time or are too tired to actually write a post. The photo stream will let you know where the photo was taken during our trip. 🙂
Keep Following!
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Thanks everyone!
Eric & Michelle 🙂
Trail of Trolls 