Visalia Work Continues…

 Hi Everyone,

Paula & I are having a nice visit with Jo Ann. She made her world famous garlic chicken pizza last night in her camp chef pizza oven. Yummy!!

Jo Ann and I continue to work on painting her barn. Due to the 90+ degree heat in Visalia, we start painting each day at 6:30am. After three to four hours we’re done in and the heat has arrived. We completed the primer on the full side, and half the back. And the top coat is on the long side. All of it done with paint brushes because the wood hadn’t seen paint in thirty years. Boy was it thirsty! While we didn’t get if finished, we made excellent progress.

Tomorrow I’ll stain a portion of Jo Ann’s fence. But this time it’s a power sprayer. Should make it go much faster and easier.

Meanwhile Paula has been doing a super job readying the trailer for our travels. She’s cleaned everything, checked that all the systems work, organized the items we brought and found homes for everything so that we’ll be ready to hit the road. Thanks, Paula!

Pismo Beach is our next stop on Thursday.

Here are a few painting pictures…

Arrival to Visalia

Today we drove from Corning to Visalia, Ca. It’s great to see Jo Ann! We’ve stored our trailer with her over the winter, so now we get to uncover it and provision it for the road. The adventures await!

While on route today we got some amazing news from Mel at Recumbent PDX. He called Shimano on Paula’s behalf to see if they would cut her a break on replacing her Shimano Steps E8000 motor that had the catastrophic failure at 2.5 years old when the warranty ended at two years. Mel was such a great negotiator that Shimano is shipping out a replacement motor in the next day or so. Paul will install it on Paula’s trike, and bring the bike to TaterTOT! WOW!!! We are so grateful and amazed.

So what will we do with the brand new Catrike Trail? We’ll bring it with us on our trip. Since Leslie had a failure of her e-assist on our last trip, and Paula’s failed at the start of this trip, we figure having a spare along is not such a bad idea. Tough to have to plan this way, but it sure beats not having your working trike when you’re trying to ride.

For the next few days we’ll help Jo Ann with projects around her home, and get our trailer ready to travel. Next stop Pismo Beach.

Portland, Oregon to Corning, California

 We’re making progress getting to Visalia, but plans had to change.

Paula wasn’t happy with the Bafang motor characteristics on Sunday’s ride, so we went into Recumbent PDX yesterday to see what they had. Paul was an excellent tour guide. After test riding the Catrike 559 and Catrike Trail, Paula decided on the Trail. To the base model she added short cranks (155mm), the E-Cat Bosch e-assist, two high capacity batteries, head and tail light by Light & Motion wired into the e-assist system, rear rack, front fenders, bottle cage, Schwalbe Marathon Plus tires,  and a right mirror mount for her electronic toys.

We figure if we can get the motor replaced on her 2.5 year old HP Velotechnik FS20, the Catrike will be a guest trike and the fallback trike when one of ours fails. (Unfortunately we feel like involuntary beta testers in the e-assist market, and one of us tends to have a motor failure right before or during a big adventure. NO FUN!)

So, this morning we packed up our stuff and drove off from Portland. Thank you, Paul & Bev!! We made it down to Corning, and then figured we should call it quits for the night. Tomorrow, we’ll finish the drive to Jo Ann’s in Visalia, and get started organizing and provisioning our trailer for our cross-country adventure.

Faraday Road along the Clackamas River: 15 miles round trip

 

Paul led us on a lovely ride today on Faraday Road along the Clackamas River outside of Estacada, Oregon. 

This 15 mile ride allowed Paula to check out her new motor. And we even avoided the rain until we were all packed up for the day and had had lunch. Pretty awesome!  Check out the photos for the day…

Our fearless leader, Paul.

The river was always close at hand…

A stone house anyone?

Love this garden coffee cup!

Paula and Paul are ahead of me, as usual. 🤣

Paul assuring no one misses the turn.

Julie, Ron and Riki

Riki

Dave (somehow I missed Edna!)

Paul

Nancie

The dam

And we ended our day at Fearless Brewing Company for a lovely lunch and a brew. Thank you all for a fantastic ride! Hope to see you at TaterTOT!!

Sequim to Portland

 Hello everyone!

Many thanks to our friends for the loving send-off yesterday. We will miss our friends in our community this summer. Adventures of the road are calling…

While we started early this morning, we didn’t go far. Just 200 miles from our place to Milwaukie, Oregon — a suburb of Portland.

Why the small number of miles? Earlier this week Paula was riding her HP Velotechnic Scorpion FS20 with Shimano Steps from home to Sequim, and the motor catastrophically failed. Our local bike shop rescued her, and even looked to see if there was anything to be done, but alas, the motor was dead. A call to Shimano confirmed that they don’t fix them, but only replace them, and of course there are no spares available.

So down to Milwaukie we went to visit our friends, Paul & Bev. Paul had graciously offered to pull the Bafang motor of of Sally’s road bike and put it on Paula’s Scorpion. (Sally is Paula’s sister, and her bike was at our place in Washington. This has allowed us to escape the supply-chain woes.) Paul and Paula are working on the trike now, and I’m working baking two apple pies. They love my pies, and we get to enjoy them together.  Ah the life!

After a ride tomorrow (weather permitting) with the Portland crew, we hope to be on our way to Visalia to see Jo Ann, and pick up our trailer that she has been keeping in her backyard for us this past winter. Price for storage won’t be pies, but I happen to know she has a barn that needs painting… we’ll see…

Welcome to our Wanderings for 2022!

 Hello everyone!

We’re about ready to set out on our next travel and triking adventure. This blog will be one way of showing you the sights, and staying in contact with you. Feel free to send us an email, or call. We’ll be phoning folks from the road as well.

Below is a sketch of some of the high points we plan on doing, with lots of free-form adventures in between.

• Pick up our trailer in Visalia.
• Celebrate Paula’s sister, Barbara’s, 80th birthday
• Help Diane celebrate her retirement, and trike in the Bay Area
• Attend TaterTOT in Idaho for lots of triking
• Camp with my sister, Amy, in Wyoming
• Travel across the US and Canada to reach Prince Edward Island, where we’ll trike for a week.
• Travel southwest to Deerfield, Massachusetts to visit with my Mom and do more triking
• Travel west to attend Recumbent Retreat for more triking
• Have a short break at home to bake pies
• Travel to the San Juan’s for a bike tour with our friends from Recumbent PDX.
• Return home to pack for our travel to Arizona for the winter.

Whew! Can you say we’re traveling and triking fools! We can! Feel free to suggest places we should see (or ride) on the way.

Lovely campsite so we can trike on the Virginia Capital Trail

Our current campsite outside Williamsburg, Virginia is beautiful. We took a walk around the campground, and found a little hike that took us uphill and down dale. Pretty down by the water.

We had quite a wind & rainstorm last night, but all was well. We woke up to a clear sunny day — just perfect for trike riding! This camping area, like the last one, was all outfitted for Halloween.  We’ll expect more trike-or-treaters tomorrow evening.

So the trike ride. We rode the Virginia Capital Trail from Jamestown to Charles City; a distance of approximately 22 miles each direction. In total this trail is 52 miles. We’ll ride more tomorrow, and then ride from the Richmond, Virginia end next week. The trail was paved with mild ups and downs, and enough curves and bridges to be interesting. The trail crossed roads several times, but all the traffic was light and drivers were extraordinarily nice and polite about giving us room and the right of way. Still lots of leaves and twigs on the trail surface, but that’s to be expected this time of year. In one section, a fellow came by in a motorized golf cart, pulling a trailer that had a blower on the back to clean the debris off the trail. Nice!

Charles City had a visitor center, which provided a bit of local history. The town is the county seat and courthouse and had passed back and forth from Confederate to Union control multiple times. There was a monument commemorating the Confederate soldiers who had died in defense of states’ rights to self-governance. Rather jarring to us Northerners who view the Civil War as about the abolishment of slavery. On the other hand, there was also a plaque on the same grounds documenting Virginia’s bleak history of lynchings of its black citizens. Interesting...

 

 

 

This fellow needs special mention. He was sitting on the side of a yard, at the edge of the trail. Precious, isn’t he?!

Upon returning to Jamestown we had to check out Billsburg Brewery. We had discovered it as we set out this morning as we were looking for facilities. What fun! They were getting set up for a live band outside, so we were able to enjoy their (warmer) indoor tables and enjoy a nitro stout and an Irish cream ale. For dinner a food truck arrived, so Paula ordered us grits & shrimp and a bowl of chili to share. Yum!