eLIFELIST.com Bike Trip

We have Compete in the Muddy Buddy Race on our lists and August 19th we will be competing in the Muddy Buddy Ride and Run race in Boulder, Colorado.  It is the 2nd annual Muddy Buddy event and they have them all over the country: San Jose, LA, Austin, Chicago, Richmond, Atlanta, Orlando and Boulder.  The race is in teams of two and consists of roughly a 6 mile course with several obstacles courses; a bike ride, a run and ends in a huge mud pit crawl.  It looks like a lot of fun and we’re pumped to participate.  Check out a few videos from Last Year. 

Brent and I established a bet today regarding the amount of rain we will encounter on the Bike Trip.  Brent says we will run into only 5 days of rain for more than a 30 minute time period the whole trip.  I say we will have 10 days at least. 

If we have 5 days or less of rain I will carry 10 more pounds of gear than Brent for a week and if it rains 10 days or more I have to carry 10 more pounds of gear than Brent for a week.

Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman have started their newest adventure, "The Long Way Down."  They are riding BMW GS1200 Motorcycles from the Northern Tip of Scotland, through Western Europe and south through Africa ending up in Cape Town South Africa.  Check out "The Long Way Round" where in 2004 they rode motorcycles around the world.  Long Way Round was 20,000 miles from London through Eastern Europe, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Russia, Siberia, through to Alaska, Canada and the states ending up in New York City.  The Long Way Round has some great photography and tons of drama.  They ran into some pretty wild situations; one guy they stay with in the Ukraine that is clearly Mafia plays his guitar for them and then shows them his assault rifles, their support crew has a huge car accident and they eat horse testicles in Mongolia to name a few.  The Long Way Down will no doubt have some great stories and adventures.  In their Treks Ewan and Charley raise awareness and funds for Unicef.

It's been a pretty exciting past week getting ready for the trip, beginning to finalize the route, events, things we are checking off our Life-Lists along the way.  All good stuff. 


So, we're definitely taking a GPS with us because A. The majority of the people in our lives would not let us go without one  B.We are on a tight schedule to get certain places at certain times.  C. Brent and I get lost a lot on the adventures we go on.  We always get there though.  We found this great software called Motion Based that allows you to sync your Garmin GPS with an online map.  More reading to be done, but from what I understand there will be a map of our exact GPS position and display along with tons of other stats about elevation and weather, crazy.  People keeping up with the blog will be able to see where we are during the trip.  More coming soon about the route and what we're doing along the way.   Check the demo for Motion Based.

Ok, so the Smashing Pumpkins are hands down my favorite band and Siamese Dream is my favorite album, wanted to get that out of the way early in this post.  Siamese Dream came out when I was just beginning to find and play music and I have a deep nostalgia for the Smashing Pumpkins.

I saw Zwan play in New York a couple years ago, which was great, at the very least it was Billy Corgan and Jimmy Chamberlain playing together and I like a good number of the tracks on that album.

That said, I've never seen SP in concert and it is on my Life-List to see them.  I heard they were getting back together for a new album and tour and had hopes that seeing them wasn’t a lost cause.  I remember being 14 and a couple of my friends were going to the Lollapalooza tour the Smashing Pumpkins played in and I was so pissed I couldn't go. Now that I'm older I of course understand my folks hesitation to let me go to a huge rock festival at that age.

The battle for the tickets was pretty intense.  The deal is that they are playing 9 residence shows in Asheville North Carolina to kick off their US tour.  They are playing at The Orange Peel, which is a venue that holds about 950 people.  The tickets were set to go on sale this past Sunday May 20th at 1PM EST.  I was online, credit card in hand at 12:50 ready to put my ecommerce quick check out skills to work.  At 1PM TicketWeb.com came to a screeching halt and trying to get through to purchase tickets was a joke.  I wasn’t sure if it was my connection or if other people were getting tickets ahead of me.  I stomped and huffed like a little kid that just lost his Ice cream scoop to the ground. 

To make a long self-indulgent story short, TicketWeb’s servers crashed hard and later that night they announced the tickets would be sold on Ticketmaster.com the next day, Monday.  I was there again at 7PM Monday, burned through check out and got 2.  All 9 shows sold out in under an hour. 

It’s great that we will be able to see them on the trip and check that one off the list.  We are going to have to seriously haul it to get to Asheville by the 5th.

If you haven't seen this show on the Discovery channel yet, check it out.  The host Bear Grylls is an ex British Special Forces soldier, climbed Everest when he was 23 (youngest Briton ever to do it and live) and is a well regarded motivational leader, adventurer and a master survivalist.  On Man vs. Wild he puts himself in extreme outdoor situations and environments with usually just a canteen, knife and a flint, sometimes less and has to work his way out to safety or civlization. 

A few of the more intense moments from this season were when he ate a fish while it was still alive, ate meat from a dead zebra, drank the liquid from elephant feces because his body needed fluids, and ate a live snake, the list goes on.  It's not that he does these things to be "crazy" either, he has a matter of fact, "I need to eat, I need to sleep and I need water" mentality and that's what makes him and the show so great.  He loads every episode with tips and advice.  The show is one of the best things on TV, as is just about everything on the Discovery Channel, don't even get me started on how ridiculous Planet Earth is or the fact that I'm kind of obsessed with it.  There are new episodes of Man vs. Wild starting in June.  Hopefully we won't face any situations on the bike trip near as intense as the ones he puts himself in on the show. I like my meat cooked thank you.  

However, two of the episodes from this first season were based in places we are going, the Sierra Nevada mountain range and Moab, Utah.  I'm honestly looking forward to the unknowns and challenges of the locations we will travel through. 

Brent has "Mountain bike Moab" on his Life-List so we will be doing that among other things.  

Carry on  Mr. Grylls, keep doing what you're doing. 

Yes, slightly, but that's how we roll.  We've bumped up our departure one month for the Bike Trip,  now planning to leave from North Carolina the beginning of July, finishing up in San Francisco the first of September.  Preparing the trip by then is going to be quite intense.

Nailing down the mileage and route is proving to be difficult but exciting to see where we'll be riding.  There are a million things that need to fall into place, ok maybe 1,000 is a more accurate number.

More exciting eLIFELIST.com news to be announced soon.

We are all set to receive donations for the Lance Armstrong Foundation.  We got the go ahead from them and we have created a page on the site where you can donate directly. 

We are very proud and excited to be raising money for Livestrong.  It is an amazing organization and Lance Armstrong is arguably one of the greatest inspirational figures alive. 

Cancer cases are rising and serious attention needs to be paid to cancer research and awareness.  We hope to do just that with our trek. 

Check out our donation page and help us reach our goal of \$20,000 !

I was dead set on using Flickr to host the photos for the trip and fully prepared to pay 24 bucks for a pro account to do so.  Then I discovered that Google's Picasa is finally available for Macs, great news.  Picasa is really great software, the simplicity of it really makes uploading, creating albums and sharing with people super easy.  You can create as many albums as you want.  So what we will be doing is creating a daily album of photos on Picasa.

Picasa allows you to grab the HTML code to put on sites, which is what we will do in the blog and then set up the link to that particular day's album on our pictures page.  Of course I have no doubt we will have to buy more space before the trip is over.

I can't deny my home state.  The Lincoln Highway just looked so straight forward and easy, that was the problem.  We've gone back to thinking we'll start in North Carolina again, and 99% sure we'll start there.  We'll still end up in San Fran.  It just seemed too easy to do the Lincoln Highway (famous last words).  We want to do something a bit different.  The plan (for now) is to ride across NC then head north through Kentucky and up through Nebraska, then Colorado, Moab Utah, Salt Lake, The Sierras and then on to San Francisco. 

Starting in North Carolina makes me more excited about the route, I'm really looking forward to riding across the state I grew up in. 

Brent and I had a long conversation on the phone today about tackling the trip.  It's difficult to not get bogged down in all the details of it, but I think it will be that much more fun when everything's laid out.  I'm all about some spontaneity but I like to have deadlines and guidelines too, especially when we establish them. 

We've been hitting the web pretty hard to research what the best things are to do and see on the trek.  If you know of anything we should see or do along our route please send us a message biketrip@elifelist.com  We plan on stopping at a lot of college, Wake Forest being one in particular.