tiredlavender

Maelochs

What's the starting salary?

diphthong

there were 59 national parks but supposedly the indiana seashore dunes just got made so make it 60. personally...i'd be content with doing utah and heading north into wyoming, idaho and montana
then crossing over into canada and hitting the ridiculous number of canadian rockies national parks up there. or hit the pacific coastal states with an equally ridiculous number of parks. great basin
national park in nevada is ridiculously out of the way but worthy as is the journey to get there.

bakerjw

A dog, little money and no plan. I hope that you have invested well in the realm of bike karma.
Before embarking on several hundred mile rides, I have well maintained gear, a strong line of credit and plans on how to cope with any issues, physical, mechanical, mental, etc... that might arise along the way. And I a still often unprepared for what awaits.

Cyclist0108

Can I make a suggestion: Cut your teeth first on the Pacific Coast route, north to south. It is more forgiving, there are a lot of cyclists along the way, and it tends to be a bit more socially tolerant than some of the inland locales. If that goes well, you will learn a lot, make some good connections and friends who like to bike tour, and the rest will be more likely to succeed.

I worry about your dog.

luevelvet

You can't even bring your dog into many of the national parks and not to mention that many of them cost a good bit to even get into. You must have another vehicle if you have a pup, so how will you manage potential repairs and fuel?

I know we probably sound like Debbie downers here but it's always better to be prepared than not and as someone else mentioned, having a pup along the way, I feel it's a little dangerous if you plan on not being financially prepared. What if the pup needs medical attention? How will he get on while you're on your multiple centuries per week rides? How will you pay for the calories required to keep that up?!

Either way, if you do decide to move forward with it, I hope you have fun, stay safe (your pup too!) and find what you're looking for out there.

berner

This is excellent advice. While you have my best wishes, don't burn your bridges behind you.

Maelochs

I am so thrilled by this invitation. it has been hard to find riding buddies after those last five murder convictions .... but those guys were no fun to tour with. I am sure with you and I it'd be different.



WARNING: I do the "Bad Cop" before the "Good Cop," so please don't quit early.

Seriously, i wish you well, but "No plan" tends to end up as "No trip" pretty quickly. I second @wgscott: I'd definitely do some short trips first just to see what went wrong and what worked.

Also, and in my mind WAY more important:

To me this is the big one. If you end up going for long periods of time without food, or have to walk a long way on an injured ankle after a crash on a rarely used road to nowhere, or whatever ... that's cool autobiography material. For the dog, that could be severe abuse.

I have done a few long tours. There will be times the only route will have cars passing at 55+ mph on a two-lane road with no shoulder---where does the dog go? Would the dog be in a trailer? What if the trailer breaks? ( Tires, wheel bearings, and axles regularly fail on long trips, according to people I know who have done long trips with trailers.)

The dog will be 100 percent dependent on you---food, water, shelter, care. And one of the things about "adventure" is that it often brings hardships.

That is fine if you are solo---as I said, it makes for great stories. But putting a pet through that stuff might be downright cruel. You have to think worst case scenario when planning for others, while if it were just yourself, you could legitimately say, "Well, I will just tough it out."

If you had to walk dozens and dozens of miles through intense heat or driving rain, you'd just do it---or die, quite literally sometimes. But when the hot pavement burnt your dog's paws, and then roadside glass cut them, and your dog simply could not walk any more .... you might be endangering both your lives.

Traveling with a pet is like traveling with an infant in some ways---that is how I would think of it. You NEED a plan, and a good one, to protect the being whose life might be totally dependent on your own.

On The Other Hand:

There is probably a way to make all this work. Maybe not as romantic a "plan" as "We're just heading out, let the road take us where it will!" but still a way to do this. I think this is a super impulse, and I Want you to succeed. Having done some road trips, I can attest that they are excellent vehicles for delivering personal knowledge---not always pretty, not always pleasant, but often life-changing and life-affirming. The "Journey of Discovery" is all kinds of fun---and pain, and pleasure, and trial, and joy, and everything life can offer, distilled and concentrated and delivered day after day. Great Stuff!

You will need to have some plan, if this is all to work out and actually deliver what it promises. What a bummer if the trip ended after 19 miles because you failed to account for one or two major things, eh? But if you can find that balance between sensible planning and invigorating romance .... Go For It. You will regret a lot of little things but I can pretty much guarantee you that unless you are stupid (which I do not believe, based on these communications) you will Never regret undertaking this trip----or pressing on, on the many occasions where you will be forced by circumstance to consider going ahead or turning back.

Go For It---and please, when you can, drop a few photos and a brief travelogue on your friends her at BF. This could be an awesome adventure even for those of us who have to stay home and save for impending retirement right now.

You go, girl!

(And if you see anything sexist in those words, I am not sorry ... people are too ready to be offended. I just want you to live your life and do it well, and you seem more willing than most to accept the challenge---and you are female. So .... You Go., Girl!!! Bravo!!)

indyfabz

I refuse to bite on this one.

Milton Keynes

Sorry, no money and no plan sounds like a recipe for failure. If I could take 6 months to a year off work to bicycle around the country, that would be awesome, but I would definitely plan things out at least a little bit and make sure I was able to pay my way across where I needed to. What happens when you get out in the middle of nowhere and have a major bicycle breakdown? It happens.

I've followed a guy who basically tried the same thing, bicycling across the country with no plan and little money other than a Gofundme account. It ended in failure. Failing to plan is the same as planning to fail.

That being said, I don't think you have to have a rigid plan that you can't deviate from, but best to at least know what to do when you get into a pickle. Don't let me discourage you, because doing what you hope to do sounds like a lot of fun. But just don't go into it blindly. Go to the touring section here and talk to experienced cyclists about what to do/what not to do.

livedarklions

So when we have to resort to cannibalism in Death Valley National Park, who gets to be the oyster?

Please don't take the dog.

Maelochs

Arctic explorers found their sled dogs to be quite useful in certain emergencies ....

jefnvk

Assuming this is real, here are all the NPs in Continental US:


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:N...ks.forwiki.pdf

Just a check of reality, to hit them all you are looking at 12-13k miles, at least how I'd route it:
Down the West Coast
Through that band of parks heading to Rocky Mountain
Down to Big Bend
Across to Smokies
Down to Florida
Up to Maine
Across the bottom of the Great Lakes to Ohio then up to Minnesota
Across to Yellowstone/Grand Teton
Up to Glacier
Over to Washington

Cutting out the East Coast, going from Hot Springs to Minnesota brings it down to a more manageable 8000 miles. Either way for an inexperienced cyclist with no money and desire to actually see the parks, you are looking at well over a year. From LA, you could easily hit SoCal, Az, Utah and Nevada parks in a couple months.

Make sure you plan your seasons well. As others have said, maybe try the Pacific Coast first, you can easily extend that onto a full trip if it goes well. If not, easy to get back.

Other than that, sounds like a great time, but I'm out. Family and responsibilities and such...

livedarklions

Technically, the goal of biking to all of the National Parks is probably impossible. If OP wants to bike out to Isle Royale National Park, she'll have to time it for the next time Lake Superior freezes over. Generally, that happens every 20 years or so, but global warming may be messing with that going forward. She could take the ferry--it's really a great park. Unfortunately, bikes will have to be left on the mainland, they're not allowed on the island.

And if one wants to be even more ambitious, there are an additional 47 National Historical Parks in the continental U.S., filling in a lot of the blank space in the map of the 48.

jefnvk

Yeah, I left off the logistically difficult ones for a reason. The whole thing was more to show why planning is somewhat important anyhow. It isn't quite obvious that something like hitting up all the parks one could cycle to involves nearly riding around the entirety of the continental border, as well as criss crossing a lot of the west.

indyfabz

The Iditarod just started this past weekend.

But I am still not biting on this one. Seen it too many times.

luevelvet

Dogs can handle the cold better than they can handle the heat. There was a film made about two European kids (well hearted I felt) who took a road trip around North America down into South America with their Bernese Mountain Dog. They failed to account for the heat in Death Valley and they struggled to keep the poor pup alive during that latter half of the trip and this was all in a modified school bus, not on bikes. They caught a tremendous amount of flack for it online when the movie came out. :|

livedarklions

OK, your list mentioned riding to Minnesota, presumably to hit up Voyageurs. While Isle Royale is part of Michigan, it's actually a much shorter boat ride from the Minnesota mainland than from Michigan, so I thought you might be routing her to Grand Portage, MN to take the boat as well.

jefnvk

Huh. Lived in Houghton for many years, never realized they also ran a boat from Minnesota!

FWIW, the side between Minnesota and the Isle freezes over nearly every year as well. Don't need the entire lake frozen over to get an ice bridge to it. Lost at least one of their transplanted wolves back to the mainland over it this year.

And now you got me wanting to ride my fat bike to it

Kedosto

livedarklions

I think if you try that, you'll end up screaming the lyrics to "Wreck of the Edmond Fitzgerald". Definitely dress warm!!

I got chased by a moose there once. Whatever you do, don't try to imitate their sound.

Maelochs

By the way ... it was a debate among arctic explorers back in the later 19th century whether sled dogs were worth their weight in food carried for them ... or as food for the explorers when rations got tight. To some degree the humans could hunt and feed the dogs ... but when things got really tough, the dogs went from tractors to crops, so to speak.

Not suggesting that in this case, except comically.

Considering how frequently and passionately the OP has responded i think @indyfabz might have deduced properly on this one ....

Cyclist0108

Another option is she took one look at all the cranky old men responding, and decided she wasn't going to find a like-minded touring partner here.

livedarklions

Listen, we gotta stop this now, because if she rides around for a year, it's just a matter of time before she ends up on my lawn.

Milton Keynes

A Møøse once bit my sister... No realli! She was Karving her initials on the møøse with the sharpened end of an interspace tøøthbrush given her by Svenge - her brother-in-law - an Oslo dentist and star of many Norwegian møvies...