Party on!
We have scheduled a couple of kick-off parties – one in
Indianapolis and one in Washington, D.C.!
The Indianapolis one will be in the evening on Saturday, May 25th,
likely at a park in the Indy area. It’ll
be a casual bbq, no charge to anyone who wants to attend; all we ask is that
you RSVP on the Looking Out Across America Facebook page so we can plan
accordingly!
The party in D.C. will be on the evening of Sunday, June 2nd. Location is still TBD – likely at a bar in
the area, so we’ll keep you posted on that.
If you can attend, please RSVP on our Facebook page so we know how many
to expect! Bring your friends, come on
out and have some fun! RSVP as soon as
you can – we need to start working with a location very soon in order to have
space reserved!
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| The party WILL NOT be here, unfortunately it was booked :( |
Donations
$1,000 is nothing to balk at! Hey, that’s $1,000 that might not have made
its way to LOF any other way, right?
But…I’m pretty sure we can all do better than that! And I’m not exempting the two of us from
doing our part and putting our money where our mouths are! We’re going to use that link and donate a bit
of cash to LOF via LOAA right now!
And hey, it is tax refund season, right? ;)
Sponsors
Finding sponsors is, frankly, hard as hell, and an exercise
in accepting rejection. It’s tough to
try to expound upon the value that a company may realize from sponsoring a
small, 2-person ride across the country, versus the immediate impact they
receive from sponsoring a single day road race with hundreds of participants. We haven’t yet given up though!
That said – we have received some fantastic discounts on
amazing saddles from Brooks England, discounts on backing meals from
Backpacker’s Pantry, and a product donation from Gu. We certainly are appreciative of the support
offered by these companies!
Twitter
We have one now!
Follow us at @LOAAmerica
Biking
Oh yeah…we did sign up to bike 4,400 miles across the
country, didn’t we?!? It’s FINALLY
trying to become Spring here in Indiana, so we’re finally starting to be able
to get out on our bikes again! We’re
going to try to up our mileage every week until we take off, so we have a good
base biking fitness built up before we take off (not to mention getting our
asses used to sitting on our saddles, ouch!).
We only got in about 26 miles last week, so there’s nowhere to go but
up!
We tried out spin classes for the first time a few weeks
ago, and will work those into the mix as well – that’s a good, hard workout in
an hour, and it should help increase our cardio fitness in ways that our slow
pedaling on heavy bikes on the road right now cannot. Bring on the pain!
Route
We’ve had our route and tentative schedule up on the website
for a while now, but we spent several hours this weekend actually planning exact
campgrounds, hostels, or hotels for our overnights! It feels like we took the trip in our minds,
and makes it feel even more real. And we
now have a good idea of how much lodging will cost for the 94 or so days we’ll
be on the road. Thanks mostly to Kansas
and its fantastic plan of letting cyclists camp in its city parks for free, we
should be able to keep our lodging to around $1,500 for the entire summer –
that’s an average of about $17 a day! To
put that in perspective, if we stayed in the cheapest of seedy motels for 94
days, we’d be out about $4,500 – yikes!
We likely won’t post our exact overnight plans on the site,
for safety’s sake, but about 75% of our total overnights will be spent camping,
with another 10% or so spend in hostels or donation-only church or fire
department lodging. Can’t wait to see
what it feels like to live as minimalists for 90 days!
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| This is our new backpacking tent! We're going to see a lot of it this summer! |
T-Shirts
We still have t-shirts available and in-stock, so if you don’t
have yours yet, we’re ready to get one to you!
And, Delaware is still shirtless, so if you or anyone you know lives
there, help us cover 100% of the states with Looking Out Across America t-shirts!
Thanks to all of you for your support, and for still reading
these blogs even after we inundate you on Facebook with random updates! Expect more of them to come as the pace of
preparation increases as the trip gets closer!
