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A few final points about our trip planning and execution:

Google Maps was the starting point for planning our intended route. I’ve used this for a few years in riding the Fox River Trail, the Great Western Trail and the Prairie Path around home. The folks at Google seem to know with some accuracy the best bike routes.

I’m still working on my relationship with Strava. A few biking geeks I know (I’m looking at you Tim Lenning, Tim Dull and Matt Pleus) seem to love Strava more than their wives. I’ve found it to be a little annoying in automatically stopping a ride when I take a break, or not restarting automatically when I resume; and the mapping function is sometimes painstaking: e.g. when mapping a route from Portland, OR to our overnight in Lyle, WA, Stava added 83 miles to the route in order to take us on more remote trails and roads instead of the 10 miles on Old Hwy 8 that I plan to ride. But, I’m committed to Strava as I know several people are interested in the route details that it can provide to followers (and it will give my son-in-law Jacob chances to give me “Kudos”, which he seems to do on the app every time I do so much as climb a flight of stairs).

My biking geek-friend Matt also convinced me to get a Varia taillight which includes a camera and a phone app. This one I’m fairly keen on as the camera picks up approaching cars about a quarter mile behind and provides an audible alert that someone is approaching from the rear, who I can then see in my rearview mirror. And, in case some idiot in a pickup truck does decide to run us off the road, the camera will pick up license plates and record the incident so we can track them down and give them recommendations for an anger management program. (Note: all idiots drive pickup trucks, but not all pickup truck drivers are idiots, which makes road biking a bit confusing.) The Varia taillight is designed to attach to the seatpost, but I had to construct an extension of PVC pipe since my tent blocks the seatpost location; this is perfectly functional, but the appearance of a tailpipe on my already overloaded bike makes Lecy chuckle.

In planning overnight stays, I was hopeful of finding some bars or restaurants that wouldn’t mind us pitching up on their lawn for a night. Thanks to Haleigh at the Ramblin’ Road Brewery in Ontario, I discovered Harvest Hosts, which is an organization of independent business owners that puts this type of service out there for folks like us. Though in the fine print, Harvest Hosts disallows tent camping (they don’t want to encourage walking into the woods with a Chelsea drawstring bag 💩), but I’ve found brewery owners like Haleigh are happy to accommodate.