Two days and counting
When I submitted my post, One Week and counting, I had intended to start writing daily entries. I thought it might be interesting to have a countdown of the last days — the planning, the training — before my departure.
Well, clearly, I was not able to fulfill that goal. What prevented me from achieving that goal was also my single most time-consuming activity in the past few months: a creative writing class. Last October, before I ever had the idea of riding my bicycle to Alaska this summer, I signed up for an independent study creative writing class. It has been finishing that class that has taken up nearly all of my spare time since early March.
Since the class was offered as an independent study course through the Continuing Education department at the University of Utah, I was able to work through this class at my own pace. I had no classes to attend, but I had quite a bit of reading and writing to do over the past eight months. I would do the assigned readings, prepare the written homeworks, and then hand them in at the Continuing Education office. A week to two weeks later, my graded homework would show up in my mailbox. I never met the instructor or the grader for this course. My college days are a distant, fading memory for me, but I do believe I worked harder at this course than any other course in all my years of undergraduate and graduate studies.
So, I handed in my final project yesterday! Just in the nick of time, I finished it. Pat will have to mail me the graded final project when it arrives from the grader.
Last night, since I didn’t have any writing to do for my class, I was able to spend the entire evening getting together all of the gear I’ll be taking with me on the bike tour. It’s all laid out in a spare bedroom in the basement. It doesn’t look like a lot, but I know from the three-day tour I took a couple weeks ago that I’ll have some difficulty fitting it all into the four panniers. I have about 5300 cubic inches of storage in the panniers themselves, plus the top of the rear rack which is where I’ll strap on my sleeping bag and tent. Tonight’s goal is to experiment with packing it all up in such a way as to provide a balanced load, front-to-back and side-to-side.
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