Magrilless

We started our morning at the farmer’s market where Maggie and Tessa made their own smoothies on a bicycle-powered blender, and we all got free tune-ups for our feet-powered bikes. 

A couple hours at the air-conditioned library rejuvenated us for 500+ steps into the sky. A picnic lunch in an old shady orchard followed this jam session with a lovely view. 

We eeked across the intersection just after the railroad crossing bells began to ring and even had time to rescue a frog from the middle of the bike trail. We thought he was dead, actually, until Maggie bent down to release him in the shade and he jumped straight out of her hands!
And a hot afternoon is best spent in the shade of a tree-lined creek while magic spells are shouted and evil Old Lady Crocus is vanquished. 

We’ll cap it off with dipping mini marshmallows in dark chocolate and rolling them in chopped peanuts and sprinkles. Summer!

In two weeks, we will be leaving Durango for two weeks of driving, separated by two weeks of biking. Round trip, we will cover more than 4000 miles in our little red (fuel efficient, thank god) hatchback. We will spend more than 80 hours sitting on our duffs, watching (movies on our portable DVD player, thank god) our country and Canada fly by. And in the middle of that, we will each pedal our own bikes 180 miles from one side of Prince Edward Island to the other. 

We’ve been thinking about this trip for 9 years, planning it for realsies for 9 months, and obsessing about details for at least 9 weeks. I’ve gathered little games and trinkets for the girls for each day of car travel, reserved bed and breakfasts on the beach or farms with the cutest animal residents, and discovered how to pack all our camping gear plus four bicycles in our teeny car. 

Seasoned travelers, parents of road trip troopers, bike tour veterans – what advice do you have for us??

Everything four people need to live for two weeks on bicycle. 

Last weekend, we went for it. The girls and I took off to the wild on our own for a weekend in the woods. We drove an hour and a half with Harry Potter to keep us company until we found a peaceful spot off the main dirt road where we could pitch our little tent on mostly level ground.

We went on a lovely 4-mile loop hike where we saw 2 elk and hawks, hid from the ATVers, and found broomsticks on which to practice quidditch before the house cup was awarded (they’re both in Griffindor, though often Tessa defects to Hufflepuff).

We were a little silly.

And definitely a lot dirty.

And these girls are amazing adventurers!

You may notice things looks a little different here all of a sudden. I think(!) I have successfully moved our old blog to a new address. But you should only notice that it is cosmetically different. If I’ve done it right.

If you care to know the reason, our old site was difficult for us to use on other devices besides a computer. Now that we’re on the go so much more and looking forward to amazing and exciting trips to share with you, we needed a way to update y’all using our phones and junk.

So, here we are. Here we go. If you have problems, ask someone else cuz I just followed the “Step 1” instructions and got us this far!

And it happened as good as it could have. I left home a little after 6, to give Stephanie and I the most benefit we could.