We made it

Peace gardens

More peace gardens

rock bridge at (you guessed it) peace gardens

The is at Foxboro park along Legacy. Net is tired and so am I. This is the point that we really had to push ourselves.

Lunch time

AB and Daddy made banana cars to race. We should have taken pictures of them. Here's the leftover banana to eat

Little Red got her face painted. She had a very distrustful look on her face while the lady was painting it.

Here's our "we made it" shot. The bikes have to be in the picture too because they are like family now

This is our congratulatory dinner. We actually didn't eat much. Just not hungry (yet).

As much as I'd like to blog more tonight, I'm beat. Net and I will write a joint post tomorrow summing up the whole experience.

Farmington at 36 miles

Well, we made it to Farmington. That last scentence really deserves an exclamation point, but it takes ttoo much effort to press down two keys at once. :)

Ya, we are a bit tired. We aren't totatlly wiped out but we are spent. No worries, though. This Harmons has a lounge area with super cushy chairs. It even has kid chairs (that are also super cushy) for the kids to play in.

Speaking of the kids, I've had the pleasure (and pain) of listening to them interact. They are sitting negative inches from each other in the trailer. The first 20 miles or so they didn't really do anything. Over this last stretch along Legacy they began "chatting". At first AB decided it would be fun to convince Little Red to bite him. Usually this is a bad thing, but they where having a lot of fun with this. Little Red obviously knew it was a game and she wasn't hurting AB. They played like this for some time. I could tell they were playing all sorts of other games, too, but I couldn't hear everything they were doing. One of their games did end up in AB hitting Little Red so I had to put a stop to that, but overall they really do play together well.

I forgot to get the Camera memory card so I'll have to upload pictures once we get home. We are thinking we will be home by about 6pm. We'll wrap this up tonight.

We're about 15 miles in but the first big "oops" happened at mile 5

I'm sitting at the Peace Gardens on a bench in front of the playground. The song "Call me Baby" is playing at a festival on the other side of the park. It's a pleasant 80 degrees or so and Net and the kids are off exploring.

This is our first stop. We are about 30% into our trip. Kids are doing pretty well. Little red slept most of the morning and AB just watched the scenery. Net's back is hurting her a bit. My knees is hurting. Otherwise we are doing pretty good. The next major planned stop is at the Harmons in Farmington. That's where we will eat for Lunch and get some yummy treats.

So the most interesting thing to report is my flat tire. We were about 3 miles into the actual Jordan River Parkway part of the trail. There was a fork in the trail and I took the wrong direction. Net realized the mistake and headed back. I can't turn around quickly so I had to find an open space. Well I got onto the street all of a sudden my back tire kept jumping up and down like I was rolling over big rocks. I wasn't, of course, so I stopped the bike only to hear a "whooosh" sound as air is flowing out of my tire like a heavy wind. The pictures below tell the rest of the story:

Whew! Most stressful part is over

So we've decided that public transit is rather stressful. Sure, in normal circumstances it's a relatively stress free environment but we've got some unique needs today. Our biggest fear was somehow losing the kids, or perhaps losing the bikes. Negotiating 2 bikes (one way oversize), 2 big bags, 2 kids (who sometimes don't listen) into that little space allotted for bikes on the Trax felt daunting.

We're happy to report that all turned out well. With the new Trax trains there are no stairs to climb and there's a surprisingly fitting space (pun intended) for the Yuba and Net's bike. Pictures below tell the story.

Here we are saddling up for the downtown ride to the Courthouse Trax Station

Courthouse Trax station. See all the people? We were crossing our fingers that they weren't planning to take the same train as us.

So roomy!

Fits like a glove. No need to worry.

Here we are at the 2700 W station. Yep, that's water on the ground. It rained a wee bit.

We made it! Celebration snacks - kids are even smiling.

(As a side note, we made it to Oma and Grandpas at about 8:30. We left our house at about 5:30. We spent $9.50 to travel by train and light rail, with additional 5 miles of bike riding to make the connections. If we had taken the car it would have taken us about 50 minutes and about $6.50 for the price of gas and maintenance (at $0.55 / mile it would be $25). If I had a little (a lot) more time on my hands and could electrify our bikes it would be about 1000 watt-hours to travel 50 miles at a cost of about $0.08 with a travel time of about 2.5 hours.)

And we're off!

I'm sitting in the air-conditioned train car of the frontrunner. The first phase of our trip has begun. We will be riding the frontrunner to SLC. We will then ride our bikes to the Courthouse Trax station and then on to the West Jordan trax stop. From there we will be riding the bikes to Oma and Grandpa's house.

Here's some pictures:

Pasta Power Potential!

Here's the setup: Yuba Mundo, Nashbar Kid Trailer, Windsor

Here comes the train

So far the most interesting thing that has happened is realizing that our Yuba (the orange bike) is really, really long. The Trax portion of our trip is looking a bit more difficult.

Also, we had our first "what in the world are these people doing" stare down from this lady on the Frontrunner. She had to move her bike for us to get our bike in and she seemed very distressed by that. Oh well.

We'll report back tonight.

It's on!

The weather looks good tomorrow, so our epic bicycle adventure is a go.

In case you haven't heard we are going to (attempt) to ride from Oma and Grandpa's house in West Jordan to our house in Roy using the Jordan River Parkway, Legacy Parkway, and newly minted Rio Grande trail. Total mileage is 51.4 miles. And yes, the whole family is going including chillens numbers 1 and 2.

I know what you're thinking: "that's too far", "the kids will never make it", "it's not worth it". Well... maybe. We are going to try our best, and we do have a number of contingency plans in case of unexpected... results. But I'll tell you what, since we've been planning this for about a year, and all the work that we've done to build up to be able to do this, I personally think we've already been successful. I'm especially proud of Netty to be able to go from not biking at all to being able to complete a 25 mile bike ride across Antelope Island. I've watched her just trudge on, even though she's tired and just wants to go home. And at the end, we both feel that good feeling that comes from accomplishing something that's hard.

So we'd like to invite our blog audience (what are we at, now, 4 or 5 people?) to follow along. I'm going to try to live blog our trip. So stay tuned between Friday night and Saturday night for all the juicy tidbits of our adventure.

Happy Trails!