Month: May 2016

We leave in 48 hours. Wow! Is this really happening? After all this waiting, now we’re suddenly crazy busy trying to take care of all of the last minute details that simply can’t be taken care of earlier, as well as several that should have been finished long ago. Nothing like procrastination!

We’ve had people ask, “Why leave now, when you’ll still be riding with a pain in the ass?” We assume they are referring to Julie’s recent medical issue and not to one or more of the members of Team Lumaca!

Before answering that question, an update: Julie is getting better every day. On the 11th, she had a professional bike fit. The saddle was dropped a quarter of an inch, slid forward a few millimeters, and most of all, we discovered that one of Julie’s legs is considerably shorter than the other. We already knew there was a small discrepancy, but for whatever reason, this saddle really accentuates the difference. We built up the bottom of Julie’s right shoe by almost half an inch. These adjustments decreased the pressure on her right sit bone, and Julie went from riding 3 miles to 9 miles overnight! Yesterday, Julie rode 12 miles, fully loaded (the bike, not Julie’s blood alcohol level). So, while we’re not quite ready for a century ride (a 100-mile ride), we are upping our mileage every day.

Now back to our reasons for leaving on the 17^th:

• First and foremost, thanks to Mark’s career in the airlines, we have lifetime flight benefits. Which means that we can fly ticketless, and practically free. Woo hoo! The catch is that we must fly “standby”, aka space available. We show up at the airport and wait until every paying customer has boarded the flight. If there are any seats left, they dole them out to us freeloaders. No seat, No fly. So there is no guarantee that we’ll make it to our destination. And each leg of the trip is a new gamble. Making it onto the first flight doesn’t guarantee getting on any connecting flights.

We had planned to leave mid-April, threading the needle between spring breaks and summer vacations. Had we gone then, we’d have had no problem. Now however, we’re pushing up against summer vacation. The later in the season we leave, the less chance we have of making it. A few years ago, in early May, Julie tried to go to Italy to visit friends and family. She made it out of Sacramento, but then couldn’t make it on a connecting flight. She spent 4 days at that intermediate airport before finally giving up and coming home! We’re already rolling the dice by waiting as long as we’ve waited. To wait any longer will make standby travel impossible.

• Second, we planned over a year ago for a good friend of ours to housesit. She is giving up her apartment and moving in for the duration of our trip. We live in a very small house and being a roommate was not what she signed up for! Her lease is up on May 18, so we need to be gone by then.

• Third…Is anybody ever really ready to embark on a grand adventure? We like to say that it isn’t an adventure if you’re not at least a little bit scared. At a certain point, we have to establish a firm departure date or else we’ll keep coming up with excuses and reasons why we’re not ready. And May 17th made the most sense for us. The To Do list is gargantuan. New things get added to the list daily. But, if we’re honest with ourselves, we’ve taken care of the critical items. Everything else is gravy.