5 Weeks to Go!...Wait, only 5 weeks?!?!?

Hey guys!  Thought we’d just throw a slew of updates at you, since it’s been a while.  And somehow, we’re only 5 weeks away from heading out to the East Coast and dipping our wheels in the Atlantic.  That little fact is exciting and terrifying in the best of ways.

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 25^th, 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 2^nd.  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!

 

The party WILL NOT be here, unfortunately it was booked :(

Donations

 As of our last check-in (which was about a month ago), we were hovering at about $1,000 donated to the Looking Out Foundation through that fancy little PayPal link over there on the right -----à

$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!

 

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!