Last Bits of Preparation for My Bike Tour

I am into the last few bits of preparation for my bike tour from St. Peters, MO to Minneapolis, MN. I took a long WINDY ride today, with breaks similar to what I plan while on tour.

First was a 21 mile ride to Clayton for lunch with friends. Then an 11 mile ride to Chesterfield for a meeting, which amounted to a 30-ish minute rest stop. Finally, I had a 13 mile ride home. This gave me 45 miles of riding with 3000 feet of climbing over about 4:40 of pedaling time. Rather than trying to maintain a certain power level, I went for endurance, riding for comfort. You can see it in my average heart rate: zone 3 for the first and last rides and only in zone 4 for the middle ride.

Here is a map of today’s rides. Click on it to see more details.

I got home at 4:30pm feeling good enough that I could easily have ridden for another hour or so. I think that I’m good to go for my tour, on which I am planning to pedal about five hours per day.

On the food front, I have dehydrated several apples. The ones with cinnamon sprinkled on them are to die for! I dried a couple of pineapples. Biting into them is “nice” but after chewing them for a bit, you get this amazing explosion of flavor. Delicious! I made my first ever batch of beef jerky. It’s pretty salty but very satisfying. I will definitely enjoy it on my tour. Instead of buying trail mix, I decided to make my own from Kirkland salted mixed nuts (no peanuts 🙂 ), dried cranberries, raisins, chopped dates, and (of course) M&Ms.

My camping gear is ready to go. I added an ultralight camp chair for this trip. It weighs just a pound, folds into a sack 5×16 inches, and gives me something to sit on that has real back support. I needed a replacement silicone sleeve for the pot that is part of my cookware set. MSR did not have it on their web store but a quick inquiry via the support form got me a prompt response. For just $8, including shipping, I had the new sleeve in under a week.

All that remains is to figure out how to pack everything into my four panniers.

If you want to follow my progress on my tour, I will blog about it here. I also created this collection on RideWithGPS: St. Peters to Minneapolis (SP2M) Bike Tour. I will update that at the end of each day with that day’s ride. It will also have the routes for the next few days. As of today, it has the routes for the first three days of the tour: St. Peters, MO –> Louisiana, MO –> Quincy, IL –> Nauvoo, IL.