Journal entries are just that – the digital copy of my hand-written entries in my journal. If you aren’t interested in the daily details of our adventure, feel free to skip on to the next “regular” post.

Good day for a productive, lazy morning. After breakfast we write out our packing lists and research the ride. Reading through the pre-ride inspection trip from last month we take notes about what we want to be sure and visit and see along the way.

Excited about the trip and feeling more confident, we pull backpacking gear from the basement and pack our bags full of food and gear. Backpacking experience makes this a quick task – the challenging part is debating how much food we should take. From the sound of it, most people don’t carry much, if any – and there will be far more available along the way than we could possibly need. Still, we are taking more than enough to keep us going and whatever we don’t eat we will save for future trips.

Working through our food, we put together a crockpot full of soup fixings and let it simmer on the picnic table.

We stroll through the campground, checking out one of the trails.

I cut my hair and Ashley and I head to the pool. I rinse off in the showers and jump in, the only one there. Ashley sits and reads while I splash around.

More than enough soup for supper. Delicious!

I work on a series of blog posts for next week – lessons learned while bike riding – training for the RAGBRAI. These sum up a lot of what we think about while pedaling. Ashley read while I wrote.