Bike About 2025 – GDMBR Week 2
December 12, 2025 § Leave a comment
In my last post I only covered 6 days, so the title is a little misleading, however I will try to be a little more terse and cram in the rest of my time traveling with the lovely ladies Denise and Rebecca who invited me to join them on the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route/Ride (GDMBR). I ended the last post where section 1 of the route ended in Helena, and this post will cover section 2 from Helena Montana, to Jackson Wyoming however, I will be departing this route before then and diverting to West Yellowstone where my next phase in this adventure will begin. For now though, it’s the Rocky Mountains of Montana, and miles to go before we rest.
« Read the rest of this entry »Bike About 2025 – GDMBR Week 1
December 7, 2025 § 1 Comment
We are now in phase 2 of my great bike about in the summer of 2025. My last post dealt with my time on my own before riding with Denise and Rebecca (Full disclosure I will refer to them as both “The Ladies” and “The Girls” through my writing. I hope no one is offended by using each reference interchangably). Now we are all together and setting off, a day later than first planned, for a two week adventure south on the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route (GDMBR), covering the rest of Section 1, and all of Section 2. We were delayed a day in starting because the girls got in so late Friday night, it was early Saturday morning and a late winter storm hit the area bringing cold rain in the valley and almost 8 inches of snow in the passes.
June 22, Day 6 – We agreed to meet in the morning at 9am at Lulah’s Cafe in downtown Whitefish where we would load up on a big breakfast before departing for Swan Lake, 65 miles into our route. Lulahs was pretty busy that Sunday morning, and it became apparent early on that we should have agreed to meet at 8 instead. By the time we were seated and ordered, it was almost 45 minutes before we were seated. Partially I can accept some fault here because I was there early and I could have gone down and put our name in the queue for a table, but I wasn’t sure what had been done already, and I just awaited their arrival. With our bikes locked up we descended the stairs and 90 minutes later, after a very nice breakfast meal we unlocked the bikes and began the first mile of many. The storm that had blanketed the area for the last 36 hours was still in the area though we were now on the trailing edge of it. There were pockets of moisture, enough to warrant putting on rain jackets, and since I was the only one with rain pants, I opted in for those as well. You know the drill. When you prepare, it doesn’t rain, and when you say “It’s not going to rain” it rains.
« Read the rest of this entry »Bike About 2025 – Glacier National Park
November 30, 2025 § 1 Comment
Back in May I posted that I had a bike packing adventure that I was prepping for in June. Later in May I trialed my equipment in a 500 mile loop leaving from my home in Ocean, NJ and riding a somewhat loop clockwise through Pennsylvania, New York and then a ferry ride back to New Jersey. By the time I started this trip my basic plan was as follows:
- Start with Glacier National Park
- Ride two weeks on the Great Divide Mountain Bike Ride (GDMBR) with Denise and Rebecca
- Ride to Orange City Iowa for Ragbrai LII
- Ride Ragbrai LII to the Eastern border of Iowa
- Ride Home to New Jersey
At this point in the trip, I was definitely planning to ride all the way home, though I wasn’t entirely confident that I would make it, not was I set on a route from the Ragbrai end in Guttenberg where there wasn’t a Mississippi crossing. I felt that to better my chances of completing this feat I should break the adventure up into some logical phases where I think I would call the GDMBR Phase 1. Why not call Glacier Phase 1? I feel like the phases should be devoted to getting home again, and my time in Glacier did nothing to advance my progress home. It was merely a destination bucket list item, where I could hone my condition a wee bit more before the ladies arrived.
« Read the rest of this entry »Bike About Tri State Loop – After MTCCNJ
November 29, 2025 § Leave a comment
While covering 3 days in my last post, this post will look at the next 5 days in which I completed my Bike About, where I left my home in Ocean NJ, where I was intending to return 8 full days later after riding a giant clockwise loop into PA up through and across the Catskills in NY, and then down through Manhattan to the Pier 11 ferry terminal and onto a Seastreak Ferry back to Monmouth County where I would finish up.
« Read the rest of this entry »Bike About Tri State Loop
June 6, 2025 § 1 Comment
In my last post I wrote about the equipment prep as well as the riding prep for some upcoming bikepacking rides. Now I sit here in the comfort of my home after finishing 8 days riding a giant loop around the Tri State NJ/PA/NY/NJ area, having covered a lot of miles and riding every day. I think I will split this into two posts, and so, start this off with the first few days, and then follow it with the last.
I needed to test out my bikepacking equipment, and I needed to develop my legs. I am recently out-of-work and sort of retired, so while I have been able to put some regular road miles into my legs, I felt a need to get some bikepacking miles into them as well before taking on the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route later in June, and so when the opportunity was presented to join another group that was doing a 4 day out and back to Jim Thorpe, I jumped onto that and started planning. I had already mapped a route from Hancock NY to Pier 11 in lower Manhattan, so I just needed to add in a route from Jim Thorpe to Hancock, and thus make an 8 day ride out of this.
« Read the rest of this entry »Cycling the Pyrenees – Part Five
August 4, 2024 § 2 Comments
I had joined two friends for an epic ride across the French Pyrenees in October 2022, and 3 days into the ride I tested positive for the Covid 19 virus. I convalesced for a few days, and then rode to Bordeaux and then caught a train back to Paris where I then rode West to Plaisir to join a family friend on a business trip to Caen. This should be the final installment in this series as I recall what went down, and how I remember it.
« Read the rest of this entry »Cycling the Pyrenees – Part Four
August 3, 2024 § Leave a comment
As of my last write up I had just tested positive for Covid, my mates, as agreed to, have continued on their way, and I am convalescing in a 2 star family hotel in Argeles France for 71 Euros a night which includes breakfast and dinner. I don’t know why we don’t have these kinds of places in the US, but this was quite a deal. I was staying in my room, I didn’t allow house cleaning in, and if I left my room, I was masked, though I didn’t communicate to my hosts, my condition. I was the only one wearing a mask, so maybe they figured it out. They always put in a corner for dinner far from any other guests, and no one else dealt with me.
« Read the rest of this entry »Cycling The Pyrenees – Part Three
August 1, 2024 § 1 Comment
As I write about this two years later I find that as I open up the memories, there is a lot of detail there to harvest. In Part I I talked through how I came to do this, and in Part II I covered getting here. Now it’s the morning of 3 October, 2022 and we awake in the seaside resort of Saint Jean de Luz in the southwest of France near the Spanish border and we are going to embark on the Peter Cossins researched Ride across the Pyrenees West to East to the Mediterranean Sea.
« Read the rest of this entry »Cycling The Pyrenees – Part Two
July 31, 2024 § 1 Comment
As I wrote here, I agreed to join two friends, Tom Fahey and Augie Carton, in their ride across the Pyrenees from the Atlantic town of Saint Jean de Luz to the Mediterranean port town of Cerbere in early October 2022. I was a late add-on after they asked my advice about the route, probably hoping I would join (:)), and that all made for a frantic push by me to get myself provisioned, and ready to ride as September 2022 played out.
As a refresher, this is the route which basically is a route engineered by Peter Cousins, a travel cyclist writer who spent many many hours on bikes in the Pyrenees writing about all the special places, in all the regions spanned, and then combined them all into 1 end to end ride that could be broken up into as many days as the rider wants.
Cycling The Pyrenees – Part One
June 18, 2024 § 2 Comments
It’s been almost 2 years, and I never wrote a single line here about this (mis-)adventure. Surprised I am indeed. Some time in early August my friend Tom Fahey sent me a link to a RideWithGps route across the Pyrenees that he and another friend, Augie Carton, would be attempting in October and did I have any thoughts on it. Of course my first thought was “Hell Yes!”, however I was doing a 10 day trip in the Weminuche Wilderness at the end of August early September, and I would have very few vacation days left, and then there was, of course, the expense, yada, yada. So, I didn’t ask if I could come at that time, but I told him I would analyze the route and get back to him. There won’t be any images to add in this post, but as I scan backwards through my SMS history, I see that there was an exchange with both Tom and Augie on July 30th concerning this trip, so it got onto my radar screen a lot earlier than I remember, and maybe it’s because I got to think about it for so long, that did influence my decision to join.
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Big Bird's Adventures 