Equipment

So a little about equipment and what not. First, of course, there are the bicycles. We're both riding touring type bikes from Rivendell, a small speciality builder in Walnut Creek, CA. Mine is a Saluki, Judith's a Glorius. Both steel frames, beautifully built and featuring comfortable geometry with relatively upright riding positions. No clip pedals, no special riding shoes. We'll be using both front and rear panniers to carry all of our clothing, bicycle support stuff and camping gear.
Camping equipment is all pretty much standard backpacking stuff with a focus on light weight where possible. (REI, Backcountry and EMS have become our friends over the last months of prep). We'll carry a small tent, sleeping bags with pads and some cooking gear. We don't expect to cook that often but want to have the option and certainly want the capability to make some morning coffee to get ourselves going. We expect to camp most of the time and, depending on weather and inclination get a room of some sort once a week or so.
A great mystery and challenge in all this is clothes. Even in August it's likely to be cold in the morning at altitude so we need to be able to cover a fairly large temperature range and yet not carry so much that we need a pack horse (not an option, I'm not volunteering for that duty...). But again, backpacking stuff to the rescue - technical hiking clothes are pretty good at just this kind of thing so we think we have it covered. We'll have full rain gear of course even as we hope to never touch it (sure...).
Even tho the plan and intent here is to really disengage from our usual routines we will be carrying a small netbook type PC so that we can update this blog and stay in touch with essential emails. And cell phones, cameras, etc. It's looking like we're each carrying about 35 lbs of stuff and I'm interested to see how it all sorts out in the first couple of weeks. We can always ship stuff home as we identify things we don't actually use.
All of these things are becoming pretty much locked in now, as we'll be leaving later this week. We decided to take a train from upstate NY to Oregon, feeling that the lost time (three days out vs a flight of half a day) is worth the transitional nature of the train trip. Things have been very hectic for weeks and the train trip should make for a real change out of all that and into this new daily mode. The train also takes a northern route that looks pretty interesting. We've never done an over night (let alone several) on Amtrak so are very curious about that part too. I'll let you know how it goes.
Michael