![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.irelandbybicycle.com\/rickpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/rps20230416_231357.jpg\")
<\/p>\nI fly out tomorrow for New Orleans. Destination Canada! (well not really, but the headwaters of the Mississippi at Lake Itasca 200 km from the border doesn’t sound nearly as exciting). Packed and ready to go hours earlier than usual. Heck, it wasn’t even midnight.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
A good friend of mine will take me to the airport early afternoon, landing in New Orleans at 9:00 pm. That’s a terrible time to land!\u00a0 By the time I find the bike whereever the airport will hide is, and have everything assembled it will likely be 10:30 pm.<\/p>\n
My original plan was to then cycle along the levee to a “nearby” primitive campground 20 miles away. Less than optimal. However, that campground has some weird restrictions and a permit requirement, and I haven’t heard back from them. I’ll try to call them tomorrow along the way. If I can’t reach them or haven’t heard back, I’ll make a more nearby hotel reservation. Probably for the best.<\/p>\n
A few days back I’d managed to freak myself out. I’d carefully planned the distance for the trip , how far I’d ride every day, and thus the timing for the return flight. Then I realized I’d planned 75 MILES per day instead of kilometers.<\/p>\n
At this point I typically plan an average of 60 km\/ day when touring in Europe. That provides plenty of time to wander, discover things, plan around weather (and other incidents), etc. For my recent trip home from Albany > Buffalo > Pittsburgh > DC > Durham I didn’t have any timing requirement (as I was just riding home), and averaged 99 km!\u00a0 Not a lot to see in the US, good weather, and easy routing along canals and rail trails. That and the last two days were 160 km.<\/p>\n
So for this trip I picked a mid-distance between the two–75 km. Likely not much interesting to see, but far less dedicated cycle path. Except, well, the whole miles <> km thing.\u00a0 The book I have for riding the Mississippi trail is in miles (usually in ~75 mile increments), so I’d started thinking the 75 that I’d planned was miles. But it wasn’t. So an idiot for mixing it up, but at least I didn’t get the overall plan wrong in the first place! In other words, the plan WAS 75 km \/ day, and I had it correct. Just a bit mixed up along the way. I blame the American failure to adopt the metric system.<\/p>\n
I’ve had someone in the US ask me if I was European because I talk about cycling distances in kilometers!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I fly out tomorrow for New Orleans. Destination Canada! (well not really, but the headwaters of the Mississippi at Lake Itasca 200 km from the border doesn’t sound nearly as exciting). Packed and ready to go hours earlier than usual. Heck, it wasn’t even midnight. A good friend of mine will take me to the … Continue reading “230416 -Take Two!”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3528","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-touring"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.irelandbybicycle.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3528","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.irelandbybicycle.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.irelandbybicycle.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.irelandbybicycle.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.irelandbybicycle.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3528"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.irelandbybicycle.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3528\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3530,"href":"https:\/\/www.irelandbybicycle.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3528\/revisions\/3530"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.irelandbybicycle.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.irelandbybicycle.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.irelandbybicycle.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}