McBRAAM Wrapup

The day after and it's starting to settle in. My bucket list is one item shorter today. The sense of accomplishment is certainly very satisfying. Most of the miles, meals and hotels will soon be forgotten, but the 4 weeks spent with my brother and father generated memories that will last a lifetime. To put the endeavor in simple terms, two middle-aged adults with families and lives full of responsibilities took a month off, and rode their bikes every day under the observation of their father. How cool and how rare is that!

Some additional fun and amazing fun facts:

• 28 straight days ridden
• 26 days of clear blue skies
• 0 days of rain
• 0 mechanical issues other than flat tires
• 177 hours and 49 minutes spent pedaling
• 1,105,869 pedal strokes per leg
• 61,105 calories burned while on bike
• 7 pounds lost along the highways of America

Some final superlatives:

• Best Dinner - Piccolino Italian Restaurant in Santa Fe, NM
• Worst Dinner - None, when you're as hungry as we were, no meal was bad.
• Best Stage - Stage 4: Congress, AZ to Cottonwood, AZ
• Fewest Flats - Lance 4, Les 6
• Best Roads - Arizona
• Worst Roads - Mississippi
• Best Hotel - Days Inn in McAlester, OK
• Worst Hotel - Knights Inn in Albuquerque
• Silliest Dogs - Oklahoma
• Most barkingest & chasingest Dogs - Mississippi

Final state cycling friendliness rankings:

1. Arizona - lots of new butter poured down in the past couple of years
2. New Mexico - nobody on the roads to contend with
3. California - only state with a bike path on the route
4. Alabama - perception elevated due to proximity with Mississippi
5. Georgia - rednecks enjoy their smoke belching trucks a bit too much
6. Arkansas - abundance of chip & seal surfaces
7. Texas - "now you see them - now you don't" shoulder game was not amusing
8. Oklahoma - responsible for breaking my dog ear...enough said
9. Mississippi - nobody does old crumbling bumpy and cracking pavement like these folks

A few thanks are also in order. Kathy, Monica, Claire, Hannah and Dolly, thanks for giving us up for 4 weeks, holding down the fort back in the real word, and supporting us in this crazy adventure. A big thank you to Karen, my boss, who hopefully still has a job for me on Monday. And thanks to my cycling friends for the encouragement before and along the way.

And thanks to all of you who have read this blog. I hope you've found it interesting.

In the next couple of days I will write a post specifically for cyclists on lessons learned for a cross country bicycle ride, things we did right, things we would do differently, that sort of thing.

And for those of you wondering what I did today with my first rest day, I rode my bike, of course.

Chilling on the beach with the Party Crasher.

A swing on the beach.

Ahhhhh.

Going for a ride, of course.

The lunch stop hybrid cyclist look.

Perfect execution of a coaster brake bike stop.