Sunday March 1, 2015

I think we may be made of sugar. We don’t like riding in the rain. Woke up to heavy rain, and decided to take an early rest day. As I have been feeling rather miserable about cycling and not really enjoying the Grand Adventure at the moment, we also decided to look at our options for continuing cycling in this weather or taking a time-out.

We spent some time discussing our options, looking into house-sitting or Helpx as well as taking the train to San Diego or flying back to Spain where it is warmer at the moment! House-sitting may be an option for the Part Two of the Grand Adventure. House sitting involves looking after someone’s house while they are away, and looking after pets or gardens often for an extended amount of time. For example, if we were to go to Australia again we could look after a place while the owner is away in Europe. We have decided to definitely look into this when we get back to Canada as we will be able to set up our profile and get our police background checks in place. Helpx is not really an option for us, as it definitely involves longer stays. Most of the positions are for organic farms and require a fair amount of work for room and board. May be great for younger people, but not for us.

Ralf doesn’t really want to do another fast forward, either by train or plane.  He is frustrated about the administration and the amount of time it takes to plan the route.  Which is strange because when we were in New Zealand we were taking each day as it came, going as far as we felt like cycling and changing up the route as and when we wanted to, now I am back to planning a week ahead. Why is that?  We both know that me not being in control is out of my comfort zone. Not knowing what, when, how and how much it will cost is definitely out of my comfort zone.  I thought I was doing really well, but I guess not. It changed after France, where we were struggling to find warmshowers, because of the short notice, and the campsites were few and far between in Spain and Portugal.

The other option of taking a train or flying back to Europe involves giving up on the US and Canada, and we really don’t like to give up.

It is not feasible to go back to Barrie – it is even colder up there. There are financial issues to consider: we have paid in advance for our storage fees, we would not get any refund for taking our stuff out of storage earlier. I don’t want to waste money doing that. Our re-start fund is tied up until October and I don’t want to take a penalty on that either. Control?

So the answer is we are going to keep slogging on.

The roads in the US have been good with wide shoulders, the cars have given us plenty of room, I cannot complain about the cycling conditions, it really boils down to the weather.

Back to enjoying each day, as it comes. We are not in any rush, we are supposed to be enjoying our freedom to go where we want, when we want and not sticking to a timetable. I have been relying upon the internet for accommodation, because there are no Tourist Information offices in a lot of the Towns that we are going through. No more booking ahead and having to cycle, there are churches and fire stations we can ask if we can sleep inside, if we cannot camp.

We will have rain showers for the next couple of days and hopefully be able to find cheap motels until it warms up when we can start camping again.

We are in Texas, how great is that?