Bike About 2025 – Wyoming
December 14, 2025 § Leave a comment
July 5th Day 19 – I transition from the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route (GDMBR) to Peaks Parks and Prairies (PPP) heading out of West Yellowstone. This begins the next phase of my summer bike about where my goal now is to get to the town of Orange City in Iowa for the start of the 52nd edition of the Registers Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa (RAGBRAI). I have the entire state of Wyoming to cross as well as most of South Dakota, one of the few states left on my list to visit, and now I am going to do South Dakota some real justice and spend quite a few days riding across it. For now I am still in Montana, having left Denise and Rebecca on the 3rd, they should be finishing up today by riding into Jackson Wyoming while I will set out East bound.
« Read the rest of this entry »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 »Bikepacking in 2025 – Prep Ride
May 19, 2025 § 2 Comments
I have signed on to a ride starting just prior to the Solstice with a couple of people I have met through a local Hiker/Biker group that operates out of the Morris/Essex counties area of New Jersey. I was introduced to this group via my friend Paul that has joined me on some of my backpacking adventures and now that I am nearing the end of my working career, I am looking for bikepacking adventures as well. This particular adventure will be 2 northern sections of the GDMBR (Greate Divide Mountain Bike Ride) from Kalispel MT, to Jackson Wyoming. My plan is to leave them 1 or 2 days prior to their destination, and jump on the Adventure Cycling’s Parks, Peaks and Prairies ride and try to get to Orange City Iowa in time for this year’s Ragbrai (Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa) which some other friends I have are doing this year. I did the 50th anniversary edition of Ragbrai in 2023 and at the end of that ride we all agreed to try again this year. Once I am done with Ragbrai 2025, then the plan is very fluid. More than likely I will simply keep going and work my way back home to New Jersey, however I will probably try and work my way up to Buffalo to get onto The Empire State Trail, and ride to Manhattan and home. In 1981, with my buddy Frank, we rode fairly straight across the states from Iowa, so I am not too keen to repeat that. Another possibility is to head North, and then West and ride to Bend Oregon. That seems very unlikely, but it is not out of the question.
« 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 »
Big Bird's Adventures 