Adventurelaus

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With the Omaha to Ames Bike Tour the desire to finish the cross state ride over Iowa with another tour. My wife and I did ride across Iowa together during the 2001 RAGBRAI so it's not a first, but touring across the state by yourself is a totally different adventure. Many other adventures and life events have come and gone between then and now. But now it's the time to attempt this goal to ride the rest by myself. I'm stoked! The route I planned will take me a bit north to Waterloo, IA to catch the Cedar Valley Nature Trail and Hoover Trail for about 80 miles. Primary goal is to ride a fun and enjoyable route and including nice trails should make that more likely. Plotting the route I saw that out of the Quad Cities on the Illinois border the Hennepin Canal trail toward the east. The I&M Canal would then take me all the way to Chicago, Illinois where a patchwork of shorter trails get me across Indiana to Columbus, Ohio.  With the GAP and C&O trails the rou...

Using bicycles to explore a city is awesome.  Recently I visited to large cities that have bike sharing services.  Being able to rent bikes at one place and drop them off at another place was great but we ended up with a lot of headaches that caused irritation and inconvenience. Berlin, Germany: Lidl Bikes  Berlin has many bicycle sharing companies.  I picked Lidl Bikes since they had the most bikes available throughout the town. These bikes aren't tethered to stations, instead you just park them (nearly) anywhere.  If you park them at certain hot spots you get a discount on your rental.  Finding and renting the bikes is easy through the app.  However, one account can only rent two bikes at a time.  This meant that my wife had to create an account as well for the whole family to checkout bikes. For some reason both accounts didn't work after we created them and linked them with our payment method.  It took forever to figure out what the...

It was about time to do another family bicycle tour and the Easter weekend was just perfect for that.  Most importantly the weather was great.  We decided to bike to Yellow Banks Park by Des Moines since the park sounded quite interesting and most of the ride will be on trails.  Now that the kids are bigger and commute daily to school regardless of wind and weather we decided not to take the tandems and instead let everyone ride their own bikes. We started from Slater instead from our house, because we wanted to trim down the mileage a little.  Doing so reduced the ride by 10 miles each day making it an easy 35 miles each way. As stated earlier, most of the ride is on the High Trestle Trail.  Through Ankeny it becomes the Gay Lead Wilson Trail connector and then the southern most part of the Gay Lead Wilson Trail itself.  Unfortunately the last 5 miles are on the road with no shoulders.  Two up hills and one down hill part going to the park added...

I recently completed an exercise study in which I did weight machines for a year.  That was a big achievement for me since I never sicked long with an exercise routine.  Although I do have to confess that working through that second part of the year was though since the routine became boring and the assigned weight was getting way to optimistic.  A chip key was programmed with weights "appropriate" for me but being able to leg press only 100lbs less than the exercise asked for becomes a downer.  I do see the value of a trainer that often checks up with you in person or setting your own weight program. Now that the year is over I have the opportunity to explore the exercises of one of the other study groups.  I'm quite well aware how the no-exercise works so naturally I'm doing four weeks of cardio.  I'm really glad I wasn't assigned to the cardio group (or the no-exercise group).  The couple of weeks I've been doing cardio have already b...

It's been a while since I posted something here. Life did throw me a curve ball last year and my adventure of 2017 ended up being an exploration of the health care system. Now that I'm sewn together again (literally) I need to get back to doing stuff again. There is still the Crazy Local Ride Ideas . I successfully completed visiting all towns on a bicycle ride in Story County but the same for Boon County still needs to be done. So what better way to go start things out, going from 3 to 113? Yes, I haven't been doing much riding lately. Only commutes to work which are about 3 miles one way. This makes it more of a challenge to visit all 11 towns.  What better way to have fun? Watch my twitter feed to see when I start and cheer me on. Towns of Boone County Route ( interactive route map )

I guess I have a chronic disease that causes me to get bored of a "normal" life.  So I seem to seek always something crazy to spice my life up.  But on the same side I don't want to give up the "normal" life either.  Anyway here's my latest thing, the 10 different routes challenge: Without really verifying that it's possible, I pledged to commute by bicycle to work and back using 10 significantly different routes.  The ultimate goal is to do this within a week.  You are welcome to join me in this ridiculous challenge.  Feel free to leave a message below how it's going for you or tweet using #10diffRoutes .

I spent eight days hiking the northern most 120 miles of the Superior Hiking Trail.  My car was parked at the Lake County Road trailhead as I was initially planning to hike a longer distance (see  Hey wasn't that supposed to be a thru-hike? ).  I took Harriet's shuttle up to the Otter Lake Road trailhead.  She gave the scenic route and took me to top of Palisade Head and a tour through Grand Marais on the way there. Palisade Head Of course I had to climb the 270 degree overlook before heading south on the SHT.  The views from the overlook are amazing and it's a worthy terminus.  Of course at that time it's my first overlook from which I did see the vast expanses of the trees.  It might have been more boring if you'd hiked already from Duluth up to here. End of the Superior Trail Canada-US Border Highest Elevation The first day already shared with me the highest point of the SHT hiking trail as well as blisters on the heels of ...

Hey, wasn't that supposed to be a thru-hike? Yes, this was always supposed to be my first thru-hike.  Having hiked some of the Appalachian Trail and followed some YouTube channel of someone's thru-hike I was dreaming of the same.  Of course I knew I wouldn't be able to thru-hike the AT.  For that I'm to much bound to my current life.  No way I could leave my family for the better part of the year.  And who knows in what condition I'll be once the kids have graduated and don't require my support. When I came across the Superior Hiking Trail I realized that there are shorter thru-hike options.  And this one being somewhat close and short would be the excellent opportunity.  I warmed up my wife to the idea of being away for three weeks to do the hike over about a year, having September 2016 in mind from the start. So why stopping so early? The hike was though from the beginning.  On the first day I got blisters on both of my heels...

Somehow I kind of got stuck watching Red Beard's through hike of the Appalachian Trail on YouTube in 2014. An AT through hike would be an awesome thing. I have hiked the AT approach trail to the top of Springer Mountain , the most of the Standing Indian Loop hike was on the AT, and a section hike from Winding Stair Gap to NOC in North Carolina.  These hikes were awesome but you wonder if you ever could complete a through hike. Of course with kids in school, a job, a wife, and otherwise a life that doesn't support a year long break a through hike isn't feasible.  At least not at this stage in my life.  What a bummer! Until last year that is,  when I learned about the Superior Hiking Trail.  It's much shorter than the AT but seems to be a nice hike and with 255 to 300 miles it's offers the challenge of a through hike. Something that I could take vacation from and reluctant approval from my spouse.  So I've been dreaming of that thru-hike ever since and ma...

Skunk River Greenbelt Trail ( interactive map ) I found a cool off-road biking/hiking route that's really close by.  At first I was thinking of doing it as part of a bigger loop starting and ending from my home but then I got the opportunity of taking the kids along for a one way trip along the Skink River Greenbelt Trail.  It's a mix of single track and gravel road path that I haven't explored before. The one thing we found out quite soon is that the path was still on the too muddy side.  While it added a lot of experiences to our trip, I do agree with the sign about not biking along the trail in muddy conditions.  The mud clogged up our bikes pretty badly in the first part.  Front wheel blockage of my daughter's bicycle caused her to fall. After that we had to push (and drag a little) our bikes through the rest of the muddy parts.  Unfortunately my hands were full so I didn't get much chance to capture that with the camera. Later on the path got ...