Quick Photo Update :D

Sorry guys for not updating regularly, its been pretty busy with the eating sleeping and riding :)

Above: Floodwood MN, Catfish capital of the world. I never did find out how they received that honor...

Watch out! the man's in the kitchen cookn' up a storm!

Taking a Indie 500 type pit stop trying to outrun a rain storm! (cant see the storm, but its a few miles across the street). I pedaled my heart out, and ended up missing the storm by skin of my teeth :D oh man do I need a haircut...

Puttn' on the Ritz, and by Ritz I mean spandex. Trying to stay warm with an icy headwind! (sorry for not rotating...)

Afternoon of the Second day: my only sunny afternoon :) I also had a tailwind that afternoon, and was able to hold 40km/h for 35 mins!

Man+Bike on First day of Riding!!

and yes I know the McDonalds in the background sends a conflicting message...

Plans Change...

After a fantastic week of being an ambassador at the 2011 Canada Wide Science Fair everything was in place to get the ride started, except for the fact that I was really sick… Seems like you can do all the planning you want, but the unexpected will still happen. So Daffyd (my right hand man for this trip, and captain of the coach car) and I decided we needed to be flexible and change the route a bit. We drove from Toronto to Duluth, which gave me 3 days to try and recover, and I will bike from Duluth to Seattle. Unfortunately I am still sick, but here we are in Duluth so I will do my best and start biking today. I’ve always thought that if you do your best, then you can look back afterwards and be satisfied knowing you did all you could; because that all one can ever do :)

Pre-Trip Planning

It all started off as a simple wheel cleaning…. My dad and I took the front wheel apart just to see if it needed cleaning. To say it needed cleaning was like saying Gandalf has an ok beard, and trust me Gandalf has and awesome beard.  We use gasoline as a degreasing agent to clean the race and ball bearings (which we ended up replacing in the end anyways). We started doing the same for the back wheel but as soon as we took the back wheel apart the cone where the ball bearings ride on simply fell out. Turns out the axel in the back had broken and the wheel was riding on the thin pin that is used to tighten the wheel. Needless to say the races and ball bearings were a total mess. And thus the Pandora’s box of bike tires was opened. For the next week we looked into getting new wheels (couldn’t because modern wheels have a larger diameter and wouldn’t fit my frame), replacing the races (couldn’t because we were only able to remove one of the sides) so in the end it was a choice between putting back new ball bearings into one good race and one damaged race, or getting the whole wheel restocked using a new hub that we bought. We chose the one that would get the bike on the road :)