1 Year Anniversary

It’s hard to believe it’s only been a year since we left last April.  I’ve been working on a couple of visualizations of the trip; they aren’t quite perfect but they may never be so here they are. The first is an overall map of the route (open in a new tab and come back here for narrative).

Our total distance was 3,681.5 miles.  The trip lasted 83 days and we rode 68 of those, which works out to just under 55 miles per day.  Seven of those riding days were really half days where we went <30 miles due to reaching a major city or having terrible weather, so our average on days we rode all day is right around 60, which is what we’d planned for.  Note that in the table on the map that lists mileage some days are broken into multiple sections.  The map is quite accurate to our actual route; I recreated it from scratch using our notes, GPS tagged photos, google street view, and our memories; it’s actually quite easy to remember which wrong turns lead to the dump in WV.

We camped 30 nights (blue markers), stayed with friends or warmshowers hosts 22 nights (yellow markers), and slept in motels another 30 nights (green markers).

The second visualization is this extremely large elevation profile.  Note that the trip starts on the left of the profile; the labeling of our waypoints is a bit buggy but overall it’s a pretty cool graphic.  While the rockies and cascades are more obviously dramatic, the profile demonstrates the constant up and down nature of eastern Ohio and Iowa.

We still need to sort through all the pictures and post a consolidated/touched up album.  Probably we should record some reflective thoughts about the overall experience now that we’re separated from it, but we’ll see if that happens.