ready for a long trip!

ow ya

if your not use to travellin on a bicycle get some spandex shorts,for under your pants.they keep friction from ruining your trip:(,i learned the hard way years ago riding across the country on motorcycles.they hand wash and air dry fast also.
 
if your not use to travellin on a bicycle get some spandex shorts,for under your pants.they keep friction from ruining your trip:(,i learned the hard way years ago riding across the country on motorcycles.they hand wash and air dry fast also.

hey! thnx for the comment man, never thought about spandex that way! is it also true that bicycle guys use hard plastic seats because they wear the cushion on the pants???!!:geek:
 
Here's you some inspiration, showed up in today's GoogleAlerts.

http://morningsentinel.mainetoday.com/sports/stories/6395174.html

OUTDOORS: Pair of cyclists tackle 3,773-mile cross-country trip

BY TRAVIS BARRETT Kennebec Journal & Morning Sentinel

MONMOUTH -- Five days in, they didn't know if they were going to make it.

Leg muscles burned. Lungs crackled. Stomachs knotted. Suddenly, after barely clearing just a handful of miles along a more than 3,700-mile cross-country bicycle journey promising to dip into 15 states, Fred Rice and Matt Belcher were wondering if they had bitten off more than they could chew.

"I can't believe I did it," Rice said Wednesday night at his mother's house, sipping on a well-deserved ice cold beer. "I can't believe I'm standing in Maine, and I haven't ridden in a car in 59 days."

With Rice's wife, Cathi (and his 8-year-old son Freddie), driving the family's new RV as his support team, what began as a modest joke -- a bicycle trip from Huntington Beach, Calif to Lubec, Maine -- took on serious implications. They planned for more than a year to work out every possible logistical detail, relying on online cross-country cycling routes for suggestions and planning in scheduled off days.

Of the 59 days they were on the road, they biked for 48 of them, averaging more than eight hours a day on the road and between four and eight hours of actual seat time on their bikes.

They traveled as many as 118 miles in a single day and as little as 53 -- when strong headwinds slowed them almost to a crawl.

In hindsight, it was almost impossible to describe the wide range in emotions and sensations they captured while pedaling across the United States.

They were welcomed in a New Mexico campground and told they could stay for free.

They were kicked off a highway in Kansas by a dust storm that closed the road to traffic of all kinds, motorized and non-motorized.

They found an $8 lunch in Indiana that included fried chicken, fried catfish, mashed potatoes with gravy, a full salad bar and blueberry cake. "That's a biker's dream, and I chowed," said Rice, who burned some 40,000 calories per day on the trip.

"There are a lot of open spaces in this country," Belcher said. "Lots of beautiful places."

Places Rice and Belcher saw from their bicycles.

* * *

After all the talking, Matt Belcher finally decided to pin Fred Rice down for an answer.

"I remembered I was at a birthday party, and he called me and said if we were doing it, we were doing it in one year," said Fred Rice, a 1979 graduate of Winthrop High School and a career Army man who now lives year-round in Hawaii. "I remember the girl at that party telling me she had a chance to go to (Europe) and she wanted to know if she should go. I told her to go for it.

"Then I told her I had a chance to take this trip. She told me to go for it."

But despite the 12 months of planning and endurance training to try to counter every foreseeable obstacle, the trip, which started on April 1, was nearly derailed by two issues which crept up almost immediately.

First, after pedaling through hot dry air during the days and then sleeping in tents under cool, damp skies, Belcher's lungs were feeling the effects. In Palm Springs, he went to a doctor and discovered he had pneumonia.

As if that weren't bad enough, the doctor also discovered a slightly enlarged heart.

"All I was thinking was, 'Please don't turn this into a cardio problem,' " Belcher said.

The doctor prescribed 10 days of rest for the pneumonia. Belcher took one.

Those two issues nearly derailed the entire trip.

But even before Belcher's illness, the two men put in their two longest days on the bike in the first week of the trip -- days Nos. 4 and 5, to be exact -- and both worried that they were not up for pedaling all the way to Maine.

Commitment, though, is important to both Rice and Belcher.

Surfing partners for more than a decade in Hawaii, they were determined to see this trip through.

"If you can trust your surfing partner," said Belcher, a 54-year-old veterinarian, "you can be pretty sure that it's someone you can plan an expedition with."

"I just think it's something that society is losing. People don't value commitment the way they used to," Rice, 48, said. "I made that commitment to ride that bike every day. If I'm not broken, I'm going. That's the way I looked at it.

"I made the commitment, so I'm going."

* * *

Just as they had done on the other side of the continent to celebrate the genesis of the expedition, Fred Rice and Matt Belcher sipped on champagne in Lubec on Tuesday.

Lubec is the eastern-most point in Maine, the final stop on the 3,773-mile journey. It's where Rice triumphantly raised his bicycle over his head while waves from the Atlantic Ocean gently licked at his ankles.

They had seen the Continental Divide. Pedaled through wheat fields in the Midwest and through blueberry patches closer to home. Survived tornadoes, high desert heat and unexpected snowstorms.

"Pick an adjective, negative or positive," Rice said. "That's how the trip was."

He then rattled off the ones that immediately came to mind.

"Terrific. Great. Wonderful. Painful. Boring. Interesting. Funny."

The people he would meet along the way, in small diners or coffee shops, would find out about the trip and add their own adjectives.

" 'Wow, you guys are incredible,' or, 'You're amazing,' they'd tell us," Rice said.

But after losing 15 pounds of body weight in the first few weeks of the trip, his butt sore from acclimating to riding every day, Rice had different thoughts when he would hop back on the bicycle.

"I don't feel incredible," Rice recalled telling Belcher on numerous occasions, so many times that it became a mantra, sort of an inside joke.

But after driving a few hours to his mother's house on Wednesday, 24 hours after completing the trip, Rice said he could keep going.

"I could ride right now," Rice said. "When you beat on your body like that, eventually, it finally just says to you, 'OK, I get it. I'll go.' "

Belcher agreed.

"My butt's sore and my legs are sore," he said with an unassuming shrug of the shoulders. "But I could ride if I had to."

"I remember as a boy seeing people riding their bicycles from Bucksport to Ellsworth and asking my mom and dad where they were going," Rice said. "I remember them telling me that you don't ever really know how far they've gone. That kind of stuck with me.

"I always thought that was pretty cool, that people were doing that kind of thing."

Travis Barrett -- 621-5648

tbarrett@centralmaine.com
 
man thats a cool adventure but i wouldnt make it out of florida pedaling.if i could ever get some extra money in my pocket i would hit the road.soon!right now im finishing up an awsome chain drive.i wish my camera was working so i could show it.its very sleek and tucked in behind the seat.very well balanced and compact.it uses this http://www.scooterparts4less.com/web_gas/FS529_Pocketbike_CVT_Transmission.htm and this http://www.scooterparts4less.com/web_gas/49cc_motor.htm .but without the electric start.
 
i broke a axle on a cheaper wheel with my scrub drive.

Axles, like all bicycle components, are not equal in quality so yes added stress on cheaper bikes will cause problems.

A hardtail Fuji of that vintage should hold up pretty well though. Have you gone through the bearings, wheel, BB, headset? Be a good idea.

Goodluck on your trip, keep us posted.
 
Back
Top