The Grand Vacation Scheme of 2018

With the limited vacation windows offered when one is constrained by school and work, it is tricky to find time to visit far-flung relatives and also have the family adventure time that we crave.  This year, we decided to fit both into one trip.

The goal:

The strategy:
Put together a bike route that links multiple sets of relatives in New England, so we can both see family and do a bike tour.  In this case, I concocted a route that took us from Greenwich, CT up to Maine via Boston and Rockport. The route linked together parts of the East Coast Greenway, Adventure Cycling Atlantic Coast Route, Airline Trail, and other assorted interesting-looking connections I spotted on Google Maps, along with a couple of legs on a commuter train to avoid the traffic congestion going in and out of Boston.  Nim is strong enough that 40-ish mile days on a (lightly) loaded bike is no problem.

The first step on executing such an endeavor is to get both us and the bikes to the East Coast.  Instead of flying with the bikes, worrying about them getting lost on flight transfers, and having to figure out how to get things to and from the airport, this time we decided to try out BikeFlights.  The hardest thing this required was for Chad to carefully pack the bikes.  Despite the name of the business containing the word "flights", what actually happens (unless you want to pay an arm and a leg) is that the bikes go across country on a FedEx truck.

Overall, that process was pretty easy.  About a week before we left for the trip, a truck came and picked up the boxes, and over the course of the next week they made their way to the destination in CT.  

Our travel for that leg was somewhat quicker, and more scenic, as the weather was cooperative and gave us many fine views from the plane.

Once on the East Coast, Chad got to reassemble all the bikes,

and we were then ready to ride.

(How many of you noticed that I carefully made sure that all three bikes were represented in the pictures above?)

At the far end of the ride, when the truck came to pick up the bikes, it was too full for our big boxes, so the driver had to go make a couple of deliveries and come back, but overall that part of the scheme worked well.  We were lucky that Faith was kind enough to transport our empty boxes from CT to Maine; otherwise we would have had to ship them while we rode.

 So did we succeed in achieving this?


Of course!  Stay tuned for more details.