We Made it! Updates to Come

We finished our Pacific Cost Bike Tour on Friday, July 5th, 2013 at Border Field State Park, the Southwesternmost part of the contiguous United States, or the DMZ as Tim likes to call it. More on that later.

As with previous tours, we learned so much on this month-long journey (and that, my friends, is a huge understatement).

Each time we bike tour with the family, we change and grow, both as individuals and as a family unit. Because bike touring is hard. It’s physically hard. It’s mentally hard. Add a couple of tweens and it gets even more difficult. Bike touring tests our patience, our resolve and our mental toughness. It teaches us about ourselves, about our community and about our country. (We hope some day to bike tour outside of the United States and learn about other parts of the World as well).

And as on previous family bike tours, it will take us months to process and find meaning in all of these life lessons learned on and off the bike.

More on that later as well.

I will leave you with the most glaring life lesson learned on this trip: we’re not good travel bloggers. And that is also a huge understatement.

At the end of the day, after riding 50+ miles, feeding, and cleaning everyone, and setting up our shelter for the night and getting the kids settled in our cozy four-person tent, the last thing on Tim’s and my mind was sitting at the computer to write a blog post. The only thing we wanted to do was sleep, and sleep some more. And then we’d get up in the morning and do it all over again.

I tried to blog. I failed. And I eventually just let the blog updates go. I decided to finish chronicling our journey when we got home. (Now that we’re home, I also learned that carrying a laptop with minimal padding on a bike for 900+ miles is not good for the hard drive!) We’re slowly getting back to normal as well as getting all of our photos off the laptop and up on Flickr. I promise,  I will finish the rest of those posts!

Until then, I’ll leave you to enjoy your day and summer!

– Anne