Reminiscing after four days in

We're four days into our tour now; we finally have our full crew together, and the real adventure starts tomorrow when we will start traveling through parks and forests and camping outside during the night.  Today as I was riding I was thinking about how I came to be involved with this trip, and how we came to have so many people interested in following our trip online.  I had a chance to look at our website stats for the first time since the trip started this evening, and I saw that we've had over 250 visitors and over 2,000 page views.  I thought it would be interesting to share some thoughts about how I got involved with this trip and what how we've set up our web presence.  Read on if you are interested.

Ironically, perhaps, my involvement with bicycle touring is related to a different website that I worked on in the past.  In the summer of 2010 I was working on the website for the Student Environmental Center, and during our midquarter check-in meeting I happened to talk to Matt about a trip he was planning that summer to bike from Santa Cruz to San Diego.  It sounded really interesting and I let him know it was something that I would like to do too if I could.  Initially Matt had been planning to do the trip by himself, but after I talked to him he changed it and opened it up to more people.  He also adjusted it so that instead of staying with friends along the way we would stay at state parks every night.  During that trip Matt was already talking about how he wanted to do a cross country bike trip in the summer after he graduated.  At that time it was not something I was interested in at all.  After another year of biking in the Santa Cruz mountains, Matt and I were trying to put together some sort of trip for the summer of 2011.  But as time passed we were both busy and it was looking like nothing would happen, but then we found out about a trip to Portland that someone else from the Student Environmental Center was planning.  We got onboard with that trip and managed to fit time in our schedules to ride up to Portland from Santa Cruz in 9 days and then take the train back, finishing the whole trip in 10 days.  Matt was still set on doing a cross country trip the following year, and I was starting to consider it.  That fall I told one of my friends in my research group about the Portland trip and he asked why all my trips were north or south and never east or west.  I mentioned the cross country trip that Matt was planning, and my friend suggested that I should go on it because it would be my best opportunity to do something like that.  At some point I made the decision to set aside time this summer for the trip and I committed to it.  It's not as carefully planned as the other trips we've done, mostly because it is so much longer that we need the flexibility.  But also because we were all busy right up until the moment we left.  So we are just now really starting to get things figured out.

However, one planning step that did happen early on was the creation of this blog.  The blog is really an outgrowth of the connection that Matt made with Sean from Velo Cruz.  When Sean heard about our trip he wanted to see if Velo Cruz could be involved and if we could do more to connect with the larger cycling community and talk about various different ways to promote cycling throughout America.  Part of that discussion led to the idea that we should create a blog to record our journey.  And that was where I came in because I have some experience with web design. 
Although the initial impetus for the blog was from Velo Cruz, the main purpose of it thus far has been to record our trip and share our stories with our friends and family.  But we hope that having a website will give us something we can share with new people that we meet along our journey.  We've set up the blog so that the main page will include the most recent stories that we post, and of course someone new reading the blog can go back and read everything from start to finish.  But we've also created tabs at the top to highlight information about where we are going, who's on the trip, the generous support we've received, and how to contact us.  That way someone new to reading our blog can easily see this information if they are interested.  Most of the information in these tabs is pretty much complete, although we will be updating the supporters tab as we travel on our journey and meet new people who deserve special mention.

We've also created a Facebook page, because Facebook is a useful platform for sharing information with people.  I plan to use Facebook for quick updates each day, or at least as often as I can depending on cell phone service, and I use the blog for longer posts.  As for contacting us, I do ready all the emails that come in to biking@portlandcruz.com and they also get forwarded to the other people on our trip.  But I tend to be the most active about checking email.  We also see all the comments that get posted on the blog.  We might be slow at replying at times depending on where we are.  But we all appreciate the opportunity to share our stories as we go and to hear from people who had been interested to read what we write.  Thanks for reading, and also please keep sending questions in if you have them.  It helps to give us an idea of what people are interested to know about our trip, which helps give us ideas for posts to the blog.

So it's been four days and the adventure is really only now just beginning.  But we are happy that so many people are interested in what we are doing, and we are also very grateful for the generous support we have received from so many people as we planned the trip and in the four days that we have traveled thus far.