Our 2016 Tagteam Cycling Adventure

Our plans have firmed up for this year's travels. We will return to St. Augustine, FL on March 27th for our official launch. From there we will head north on Adventure Cycling routes with the goal of reaching Maine around the second week in June. From there are plan is to head for Route 66, which we'll pick up just south of Chicago. We'll only be on 66 as far as St. Louis, then we'll swing east to Mammoth Caves, then down the Natchez Trace to Louisiana. From there we'll head west, eventually arriving in San Diego, probably in 2017. We'll likely winter in either Arizona or South Texas, but that is up in the air right now.

The route of the first leg of our planned trip can be found at the head of our blog. Links to our planned summer and fall routes can be accessed from links on the right hand side of the blog.

We rarely plan our campsites more than a few nights in advance, but if anyone cares to join us for parts of our travels we would welcome the company. We are likely to be in King of Prussia, PA in early May and in Western Connecticut around Memorial Day.

Our blog posts are now automatically posted on our Facebook page, in case anyone is interested in following us on Facebook. There is a link on our blog to the Facebook page (since there are a LOT of Steve Malones on Facebook).

We're crossing our fingers that there won't be too many April showers during our first month back on the road, and we are hoping that Maine warms up early this year. But we anxious to get rolling again!

 

Year #2 is officially under way with the completion of our first day back on the road (no more snowbirding!). If you have any interest in following our progress, you can either subscribe to our blog or follow us on Facebook. For the latter, there is a link from our blog, or you can use this:
https://www.facebook.com/steve.malone.1420

If you join us while we are camping there is always an extra glass of wine to share!

 

Hmmm...the wine is enticing! Good luck with your cycling and travels. Look forward to hearing about your experiences!

 

Following blogs can be tedious, as most days are a repetition of the same basic theme. So after months of travel, at best you are left with a handful of anecdotes to share with fellow travelers. Our experience last night might fall in that latter category, so we thought we would provide a link here for those folks that are only interested in taking in the highlight reel:

http://tagteambike.blogspot.com/2016/04/day-9-where-hell-are-we-ga.html

 

Hi All!

We've added a new layer to our map for the spring leg of this year's route (the map is shown at the top of our blog, and I've included a direct link below). It's called Target Fridays and displays as a blue flower on the map (you may need to zoom in to see some of them). They have the date and location that we are shooting for as we head north. Some of the dates are fairly well set in stone, as we have friends expecting us (particularly in Alexandria, VA and King of Prussia, PA in the first half of May).

There is a gap that hasn't yet been filled in between the Outer Banks and D.C. That is because the ferry to Okracoke Island is weather-dependent, so we don't want to fill in dates after the Outer Banks until we know that we will be able to get there when we expect. And we haven't settled on dates for Maine in June, as we are still waiting to work out details with some friends that will meet us there.

If anyone has an interest in camping with us or cycling with us on our way north, this new layer should give you a sense of whether we might be passing near you at a time that is convenient for you.

https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit?mid=1Ewa7tb294CShFV1obpfW9Nxa9t0&usp=sharing

I don't expect we'll go to this level of detail for the remainder of our travels from Maine to California, but we might do some sort of general target dates, as it keeps us from getting too far ahead of ourselves, or from falling too far behind schedule.

 

Steve and Alea,
We love Okracoke! If you have time, take a private ferry to Portsmouth Island from Okracoke. It used to be the most populated island on the Outer Banks. Today, only a caretaker is around. A lot of the houses have been restored including the old Coast Guard Station. Many good restaurants on Okracoke. A simple favorite was Ziggys, offering wine, cheese, and smoked meats to pass the afternoon away. Don't miss the hidden nature trail on the edge of town. Blackbeard is said to have hidden at Silver Lake. Wish we were there, many great memories there. The campground at Okracoke is small and can get crowded during the summer. Don't miss the lighthouses on the Outer Banks, each is unique and has its own character. Take care

 

You rode through the part of SC that lost all the bridges to the flooding last fall. And yes the roads leave something to be desired, car or bicycle.

 

Van & Terri-

Thanks for the tips! We'll try to take advantage of them where we can, as traveling with a pet can limit what we are able to do.

Warren & Mary Ellen-

We lucked out riding the 65 miles from Jamestown to Conway on a Sunday. It wasn't fun (mostly no shoulders, enough traffic that often there was traffic in opposing lanes, leaving next to no room for us), but I can imagine the additional truck traffic and commute traffic that we would have found on a weekday. That would have been very bad.

 

Sorry to read you did not have a great ride through the SC Lowcountry. I was afraid of that but I live 200-250 miles from where you were crossing the state so I was not sure. There are not many roads that cross that part of the state due to the swamps that are all over the place there, just the highways that cross the state. That is the poor part of the state except for the coast itself. We are stuck in a political quagmire in the state over the roads that is in about in year 6 and the floods made it worse with all the bridges destroyed then.

I think you would find the cycling better in the Upstate or Columbia. We have our share of bad roads, but the drivers see more of us. George Hincappie lives in Greenville, SC and US Cycling Championships were held there for several years. His presence there has helped create a good cycling culture here. Michelin, Bosch and BMW have helped with that too with a lot of Europeans in the area. We get a lot of groups coming out of the northern states and Canada here to train in the spring too. You can cross into NC easily in the mountains and Big George trained there a lot of course. He has a Gran Fondo that starts at the Hotel he and his brother bought a few years ago. It starts in SC but most of it is NC. I have never done the event, but I have done a lot of the climbs and it is a tough route. It is beautiful and fun to ride.

 

It's good to hear that all of SC is not like what we went through. The experience wasn't all bad - at least the weather was mostly good.

It's true that all politics in local - that is very evident when you cross the border from GA into SC and from SC into NC. You guys are bookended by much better road systems. And GA would seem to have as many swamps as SC, but then it also has Atlanta.

We very likely will be riding through upcountry SC next summer. There is a big get together taking shape for my sister-in-law that will be in Northern GA. At this point we are thinking of riding down the Blue Ridge Parkway, though I hate to think what that would be like in August. I'd like to ride through Newberry, SC, as a 4th ggf was granted land there in 1773. The area is now in Sumter National Forest. I'd be interested to learn how land in so many private hands became part of the NF. It smells as though it was another New Deal scheme to provide flood control and protect water quality. The family left the area and headed west in the early 1800s.

One downside of our Adventure Cycling maps is that they expect that folks want to do the major tourist destinations. On the east coast that means we go through a lot of very heavily populated areas. And the Blue Ridge Parkway isn't much of an alternative, since there are no services along it - for most things, including camping, you need to frequently get off the Parkway for camping and supplies.

 

BRP will more crowded on weekends and you will have thunderstorms especially at the higher elevations sections in NC. You will need a tail light and headlight for your bike because there are some tunnels that curve and in the middle you are in total darkness. One of them is downhill too. We camp at Mt Pisgah and Linville Falls. See my campground reviews on those pages.

Most of that land in the Sumter National Forest had been over farmed with nothing but cotton. Even before the Depression those areas had a lot of land that was abandoned because nothing would grow there. Massive erosion problems and without much topsoil to begin with you had some really washed out areas. The land worthless and most of them were unable to pay mortgages and other loans.

So you are right that the New Deal turned it into National Forests. Newberry would be in the Enoree District and should have decent campgrounds in it. The other districts are the Long Cane near the Georgia line (a lot of state parks on the lakes there too) and the Andrew Pickens District which is in the far western corner of the state. It is good camping and several state parks are there too. I ride here and camp there a lot. The Newberry should be nice to ride in although it is becoming a bedroom community to Columbia but it would depend on where you are exactly.

Look at following SC 11 for riding and camping too. A lot of state parks and you will great views of the mountains. Go one way and you climb up the mountains and into NC. Hincapie 's favorite is Caesar's Head and in the winter/spring before he retired you used to him up there a lot. Go the opposite direction SC 11 and you head into the Peidmont. The highway is called the Cherokee Scenic Highway and part of it has a bike lane.

Where in Georgia? I am in Anderson on the SC/Ga line.

 

Hi Warren!

Thanks for the pointers. We were aware of some of the challenges of the BRP, but hadn't thought about tunnels.

That is an interesting part of the country, on both sides of the southern end of the BRP. My mother's ancestors had settled the area northwest of Knoxville, while my father's ancestors had come from upcountry NC and SC. They are all areas I'd like to spend some time in to do some genealogy research, and perhaps by the summer of 2017 we'll have slowed down enough to actually take the time to do that. ;-)

We haven't yet been given the details of where in Northern Georgia this get together will be, but I like the sound of using SC 11 as a means of getting there. It would be close enough to several areas of interest to me.

A lot of folks that settled between Newberry and Whitmire had moved on pretty quickly after receiving their land grants. My clan were the Caters, and they moved to Warren County, Kentucky around 1810 and then Posey County, Indiana around 1816. Some of them had married some Davises, likely from around Newberry County, SC.

A clan of Davises (there were many near my Caters) moved from Newberry County to around where you are. One of the sons, a blacksmith, moved to Jackson County, Illinois around 1816 or so. He ended up not too far from a Davis ancestor of mine who showed up in the same area around 1808. My Davis ancestor had supposedly come from NC, but there are some interesting circumstantial bits and pieces that suggest both clans were at least distantly related. I've burned up a fair number of grey cells trying to sort all those folks out, but SC/NC records back before 1800 are very scarce. But I keep hoping there is a clue to be found somewhere.

But first we need to cross the country twice before we get to any of that...

 

There was once a well known Cater here in Anderson. He bought up a lot of land. My grandparents bought land from. There is a park here called Cater's Lake which includes a lake he hand dug. His name was A. Postelle Cater.

 

Interesting. I found an article about the lake's origins.

There was a family of Caters that arrived at Charles Town shortly after it was founded. They had some huge land grants on the Ashley River and went on to be large land and slave owners. I suspect he is related to them.

My Caters show up in earliest documents as Cato or Catoe. I doubt they were blue bloods, since Newberry would have been on the frontier and not far off the Great Wagon Road. That suggests they had migrated from VA or beyond. There is no record of them owning slaves and it doesn't appear that his estate amounted to much, even with a couple hundred acres of land to his name.

I've done a fair amount of research in your area when it was part of Pendleton District. It's fascinating tracing the routes that people took while migrating west. A lot of folks think the predominant pattern from there was to GA and along the Gulf. But just as many went into TN and KY and beyond. I suspect most of the folks that migrated there in the late 1790s and early 1800s had come to America as indentured servants. Most eventually got the means to buy public land in newly opened territories. There's a letter written by Benjamin Franklin where he states that compared to the Irish, every native American (considered a savage by Europeans) was a gentleman. It illustrates how buying that land represented a complete reversal in a family's fortunes - paying "rack rents" to the English and living in rags in the old country vs. having the means to fully provide for a large family here.

 

Hi All!

Nothing exciting to report (though we're still having a blast), but I thought some of you might enjoy our blog about recently being denied membership in warmshowers.org:

http://tagteambike.blogspot.com/2016/05/rule-2-are-we-touring-cyclists.html

 

Hi All!

This might not be of interest to all that many of you, but for hard core cyclists and baseball fans there might be some interest:
A Tag Team Teardrop Trailer & Bicycling Adventure: Days 91 & 92: Cooperstown, NY

Stopping here was a major goal of our travels, though not for reasons that most people might suspect.

From here we will be skirting along the south shore of Lake Ontario and Lake Erie, then due west until we hit Route 66. Anyone in the area that has an interest in joining us for a night or two or longer is welcome to do so. The map on our blog gives our planned route (we'll be changing our route after Rochester, NY, picking up the current route again once we reach Lake Erie State Park this weekend). From there, calculating about 50 miles per day starting on July 3rd would give you a rough idea of where we might be in the week or two that follows.

 

Hi All!

Today we start our second year on the road, having cycled around 9,000 miles since August 1, 2015 (we don't bother to keep a cumulative total, but our pace this year should net us a thousand miles or more each month, so four months of traveling this year + the 5,000 miles from last year equals 9,000 miles)! We driven surprisingly farther than that, putting 24,000 miles on our van since that time, though a big chunk of that was spent criss-crossing Florida to find available campsites all winter long (plus a few necessary side trip excursions elsewhere in our travels). We guess that for about 3/4 ths of that total we were towing our camper. We hope to get our ratio of cycling-to-driving miles down closer to a 2-to-1 ratio this year.

We'll be heading across the Mississippi River in an hour or two, into southern Illinois. From there we'll head due east across Kentucky, probably to a point south of Lexington. Then we head for the Deep South in order to connect up with the Southern Tier (but not looking forward to heat and humidity that will be even more oppressive than what we've experienced the past two weeks). It is looking as though by Labor Day that we'll be in or near Texas. So we should be on track to reach San Diego some time in November.

Thus far we've traveled through parts of 34 states, and we will have added another four new states by the time we get to California. We are still having fun and hope to continue doing this through next year, where we have plans to reach northern Georgia in August 2017. After that, it looks as though we will need to return to Boise for a while so that Alea can have her right knee replaced.

Our crystal ball is a bit fuzzy after that. ;-)

 

Safe travels Steve and Alea, we are headed to Grayton Beach State Park in 4 weeks, and then jumping to Topsail State Park before returning home. November venturing to Paynes Parrie, Rainbow Springs, and Hillsbrough State Parks. Thanksgiving at Gamble Rogers, and finally spending Christmas and New Years st Tomoka. Maybe see you at the Tear Jerkers Rally at Tomoka in February? Van & Terri

 

We are planning on being in Baja, Mexico this winter, so we won't be in the neighborhood. We'll likely spend a winter in FL again at some point, but not this year or next year.

 

Hi Steve and Alea, I hope you all will be able to keep us updated on your travels in Baja. This is an area that I have visited briefly when I was younger with my cousins who life in S. California but feel a bit apprehensive to travel to now with all the news of the violence in Mexico. I think we'd all love to hear the details of how you find places to camp, what facilities there are and what sorts of activities you do while there. Looking forward to living vicariously through your travels. Ben