Turning Blue on the Blue Ridge Parkway...

Welcome to the first posting on our new Tandem site. Kelley and I have a tandem bicycle and kayak. A good friend calls them the divorce bike/ divorce boat, but we enjoy being close, and aside from occasional splashes, bumps and hmphs, we seem to do just fine.

We have been riding our tandem together the entire five + years of marriage. The week of Thanksgiving 2006, we're making our first venture onto the open road, touring a section of the Blue Ridge Parkway. We have a destination hotel for Sunday the 19th for our start, a rustic cabin at Glade Valley B&B for Wednesday evening and Thanksgiving Day, and primitive camping on the other days.

The past few weeks we've been busily buying and weighing our lightweight heating, cooking, foodstuffs, and cool/cold weather gear. We're anticipating temps in the range of low 30's to mid 50's and little to no precipitation. With some of the extreme, long climbs on the Parkway, there's a chance we could overheat with too much on, so we're attempting to wear layers that are easily unzipped or removed. It appears our gearing will be 54/38/26 on the triple, with an 8-speed 13-34 on the rear. It's doubtful the 54 will get used much, except for soft-pedaling downhill - but I'll betcha the 26 will be doing more than it's share of the work on the uphills.

In an upcoming post we'll add a fairly involved list of components and weights to help those interested in tandem touring. The idea is to let you know what's necessary, and what we could have left snugly at home. We've read several interesting posts from other individuals that have shipped stuff back because of the excess baggage they attempted to lug around. On the Sunday prior to our trip we did a ride with an 80% weight simulation, riding up and back on the Pinellas Trail overpass and the bridge going out to Honeymoon Island - near our home in Palm Harbor, Fl. We started with a 54/42/30, and the trial run convinced us to go down on the two smaller rings.

For starters, our hybrid tandem is a base Trek T100. We recently added Trekker bars, which provide multiple hand positions over traditional straight bars. I have bar ends up front, so this is intended to help the stoker (Kelley) have multiple positions to improve her comfort. She recently added a new Specialized saddle after being fit at Chainwheel drive in Clearwater. We've added a rear Blackburn rack, with Blackburn Lowriders up front. The rear rack has a Topeak EX rack trunk, and we just added Axiom Champlaign and LaSalle rear and front panniers to the mix, which adds another 4,000 plus cubic inches to our stowage capabilities.

Our camping, cooking & bedding gear will all be stowed in a 4600 cu. inch Sterilite tub, sitting atop our BOB Ibex trailer. My guess is that we'll be hauling 90-110 pounds of additional load with everything including the trailer, panniers, and all... even that's likely to run even higher. I've put together a spreadsheet that I'll mention and make available to anyone that asks. I will add that since we started comparing weights of everything, we've definitely refined what and how much we're hauling. It adds up quickly.

Check back for further posts and pictures. Welcome to our newest blog. If you're interested in our other blogs they are:

www.howellhaus.blogspot.com - our 2004 Tour de France trip
www.howellhaustwo.blogspot.com - our Bicycle Bathroom makeover
www.Cut20.blogspot.com - Ride to work, Cut fuel & emissions 20% each day !