Custom Bikes Update.

I managed to get down to Baum Cycles a few weeks ago and again last Friday to see how our frames were progressing, as you can see in the images bellow things are really starting to move along, it won't be long now before we have our new Baum Burke and Wills touring frames ready to build and ride.

Might not look like much yet but this box of tubes will become Garry's Baum Burke touring bike.

 A selection of frame parts for Garry's bike. 

Working out the tyre and chainring/crank arm clearances for Garry and Jason's chainstays.

 Salsa Fargo V2 touring forks.

While down at Baum I spent a little time helping to prepare our forks for our custom paint jobs, here I am masking the fork dropouts before sandblasting can begin.

 Ready to remove all of that existing paint in the sandblaster.

The finished fork for after sandblasting, next step paint.

Love the engraving on the Salsa fork dropouts, "Ride & Smile".

 Darren Baum putting the final touches on Garry's frame.

Darren doing what he does best.

A finished Baum Burke 29er touring frame, well almost, just a few finishing touches to go.

Notice the ISP Ti mountain bike frame in the background being built for another lucky Baum customer.

Garry's frame nearing completion, just a few more finishing touches to go then it's of to the paint booth for Jared to work his magic.

It's getting exciting now seeing the frames come together especialy knowing my Baum Wills is next.

Dave's ride.

I had the pleasure this morning to meet Dave Dowdle as he passed through Ballarat.

Dave is one day away from finishing his own epic bike ride across the southern part of Australia.
He has been riding solo from Perth on Australia's West coast to Melbourne after setting out on the 25th of September 2011, A total of around 4160km with an average of 150km per day.

Along the way Dave has been raising money for Mental Health Research, in particular the Mental health Research Institute (MHRI)

Dave and myself (Jason) in Ballarat.

If you are interested in reading more about Dave's ride and his experiences on the road you can visit his blog page at the link bellow.
http://davesride.bigblog.com.au/index.do

Although his ride is nearing it's end, If you would like to support Dave by making a donation you can do so at this link: http://www.onlinegiving.com.au/pages/DavesRide.aspx

Custom bike fit, Part 2: Garry's bike fit or was it more spin class

When it comes to fitting yourself to stuff most of the time you just walk into the shop, make a selection, try it on, if its close enough then purchase and take it home. The same can be said for fitting yourself to a bike. Go into shop, find the one that takes your fancy, get it in your size, make some small changes to seat and handle bar position, purchase and ride out of the shop. Easy. So when Jason said it was my turn to get sized for our custom Baum tourer frames I was sure it would be the same as the above. Little did I know...

First step was to jump into my nic's (bike shorts) and shoes while Nick (My Baum fitter on the day) installed the handle bars, seat and pedals we were going to use. From what I was told all these things need to be taken into account as it can make a huge difference to the sizing and then the comfort of the bike. Comfort is a big thing for me considering the number of Km's Jason wants me to do on a daily basis.

Second step was to remove the shoes I just put on and have Nick play around with the position of the cleats. Seriously, what kind of a difference could that make..... Oh My God! What a difference that made! My calves didn't feel as much pressure as they normally would.

Then it was onto the other factors of the bike itself. Top tube length, Seat height, handle bar height, reach etc. Each change, which required me to pedal for about 5 minutes while Nick and Darren cast an expert eye over me, made the bike feel better and better.

Things were looking easy until Nick decided it was a spin class and not a bike fit. See the rider doesn't control the gearing of the bike during the fit. This is up to the fitter. At this time Nick decided to crack up the gearing and make me work for it. Not for a short burst to see how it all looks but for what seemed like hours. The legs were burning by the end. Apparently it was to make sure that the fit still worked when pushing. I think it was to make me suffer and prepare for the pain to come.

The experts decided that everything was in order and it was now time to take the measurements and put them all into the bikeCAD system to make a bike come to life which is what you see below.

We've had so many people recommend the Brooks B17 for touring that we had to give it a go.

What did I expect from the experience? Not sure really, but what I can say is that a properly fitted bike is key to enjoyable riding. I wonder if Baum would do a custom BMX? Hmmmmm.....

Jason's frame is now nearing the production stage with all the Ti parts and tubes nearly ready to be made into another beautiful handcrafted Baum frame.

Leg 3: Europe & the United Kingdom

5342km

3 Sections

10 Countries
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The Colosseum, Gondolas, The Alps, Cuckoo clocks, Frites, Mont Saint-Michel, Guinness, Zoute drops & Tulips, just a few of the sights and tastes of what is to come as we continue to promote our charities on the final leg of the tour after leaving the USA and heading across the Atlantic to Europe.

As with our other legs of the tour the planning stage has caused many late nights as I (Jason) chopped and changed potential routes. Our original plans had us looping back and forth across Northern Europe similar to an ampersand (the “&” symbol above the 7 on your keyboard). This really didn’t seem right so it was back to the drawing board to make a more direct route or at least take out some of the kinks. In the end we settled on three individual sections covering Continental Europe, Ireland & the United Kingdom and finally the Netherlands. We hope our changes will allow us to reach a greater variety of people and allow us to promote our causes better.

Our first taste of Europe is in “The Eternal City” (Rome) then its heading north through the Italian countryside, passing through Modena, the land of the “Prancing Horse,” Yeah we’re cyclists, but everyone has their own forms of porn and one car brand in particular is ours. From there we head to Venice before moving on from Italy as we head north through Europe to Germany. After what will no doubt be a hard but rewarding slog through the Austrian Alps we intend to have a stop over for a few days to rest the legs in Stuttgart.

From Stuttgart we head to Luxemburg. But first a little stopover in Nürburg before leaving Germany. I blame Garry for this inclusion, not that I'm complaining. Garry couldn’t bring himself to go past the place without stopping in for a look at the scenery…. around the Nürburgring …. While doing a hot lap in some kind of high performance hire car. Things could get quite interesting.

From Luxemburg we head through Belgium to the Flanders region and into northern France before heading across to Paris via Roubaix and the Arenburg forest made famous for its cobbled road used in the Paris-Roubaix cycle race.
From Paris we then head to Normandy and follow the French coastline to Brittany, before leaving Roscoff on the ferry to Ireland.

After our overnight ferry ride (hope someone brings the TravelCalm – don’t enjoy being sea sick) we disembark at Cork in Ireland, the start of section two. From Cork we will head north to Limerick where I intend to drop into one of the local pubs I share a name with “Nestor’s Pub & Restaurant”.

From Cork we will then head east to the other side of Ireland to spend a few days in Dublin before boarding another ferry to Holyhead and the UK.

For the next week we will ride our way east through Wales and England to Sheffield before heading south through Nottingham to London for a few days, it is here that we hope to host the third and final official fundraiser of the tour before heading off again this time towards the east coast where our next ferry awaits us.

The final section of our tour is a loop around the Netherlands. After arriving in Rotterdam from the UK we will head south of the Markermeer then head across the Houtribdijk to North Holland before doing a clockwise loop of the country to finally end in Eindhoven, and then take the opportunity to rest, recover and celebrate finishing our journey with relatives.

Many people have asked our reason for finishing our tour in the Netherlands thinking it an odd choice and why Eindhoven in particular as the final destination. Well I have a very personal reason for this choice that also ties our whole trip together. My Oma and Opa (Grandparents) both came to Australia from Eindhoven with my mother in the 1950’s, eventually settling in Ballarat (our start point & where I grew up). Throughout my childhood I had heard many stories about the Netherlands but never had the chance to visit, in more recent years I have felt that a greater connection to my Oma & Opa’s home country and my original plans to tour the Netherlands eventually grew into the Long Road Tour.

My personal reasons for choosing this particular tour route for our charity tour comes from having had both my Oma and Opa fight and eventually succumbed to different forms of Cancer (Bowel Cancer and Leukaemia) and choosing these specific start and end destinations is my way of dedicating this trip and what Garry and I hope to achieve for our Cancer charities to their memory.

Custom bike fit, Part 1.

Earlier in the week I spent the day down at Baum Cycles with Darren and Nick, working on my bike fit for my custom Baum Wills touring bike. We will tell you all about the two different bikes we will be using later but let me just say that the Wills is full of titanium goodness.

Most people that ride tend to head on down to the local bike shop and pick out a bike of the rack that they like. The salesperson will generally choose the most appropriate frame size based on your height then adjust the seat and handlebars to get you as comfortable as possible, and away you go.

The advantage of a custom built bike is that every aspect from geometry to materials are personally fitted to you, rather than you being fitted to the bike.

The starting point for the custom build process involves spending time riding the fit bike, a slightly odd looking stationary bike that can be adjusted in a variety of ways to fit a person of almost any shape and size.

The contact points between the rider and bike are very important at this stage and will have an effect on the final design, therefore the fit bike will generally be set up with the handlebars, saddle, pedals and shoes that you intend to use.

We have chosen to use Salsa Woodchipper MTB drop bars on our bikes.

Once the fit is complete, Nick will gather all the data from the fit bike and transfer them into bikeCAD on the computer, producing an illustrated version of the bike in this case the Wills drop bar 29er.

From here the final design may go through a little tweaking before Darren transfers all the information to construction drawings in autoCAD. Now it’s off to manufacture.

If you want to read a little more about a custom bike fit and the process go to: http://www.baumcycles.com/custom-fit and take a look. You can also browse some of the bikes Baum have built over the years.

In part 2 of our bike fit post, Garry will talk about his personal experience of the bike fit process and getting a custom bike made to fit compared to purchasing off the shelf.
Darren and Nick will then observe you riding and adjust the fit bike on the spot to customise various aspects of its geometry and work out the optimal rider position depending on the intended use. All of this is then fed into the final design.

Leg 2: Canada and the United States

5612km

12 US States

1 Canadian Province

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I had initially began thinking about the idea behind “The Long Road Tour” in mid 2009 but had never actually sat down and seriously gone over a definite route, I enjoyed looking over options for where I would like to visit if I were to actually do this, Starting in Australia and finishing In the Netherlands opened up two options in terms of direction for us, to head west through Asia and the Middle East, or east across the USA.

Not wanting to push our luck to much while convincing friends and family that our tour was a good idea we decided the USA option was our best option and also opened up charity opportunities with Livestrong and Michael J Fox Foundation in the USA.

We were always going to be heading from the west to the east and New York seemed like the logical end point, but where to start..... I have always wanted to visit Seattle and Portland so our start locations were also settled.

Our initial route across the country had us flying in to LA and jumping on the train to get us to our start point in Portland, then up to Seattle before we head east towards New York, via Lake Michigan and Toronto but after reviewing our route we decided to make a few changes mainly to the start and end of the leg.

We will now be starting our North American leg in Vancouver Canada, and through a mix of riding and ferries will make our way to Seattle via Vancouver Island, then down to Portland before heading east. Starting in Canada eliminated the need for multiple border crossings to and from the USA which should make things a little less complicated.

Now I tend to spend a little too much time looking over various cities and towns that we may pass through or stop in, and it was this that led to changes made to the later part of the US leg, Having moved our time in Canada to the start of the leg and reading a number of unsavoury things about some of the locations we would be passing through on our way to Toronto (Now I'm sure these places are actually not that bad, maybe I should stop reading so much otherwise we may not go anywhere.), we decided to move our route a little further south bellow the great lakes and head directly east to New York.

The new route will also hopefully allow us to meet up with some people who have followed us from quite early on.

We are also hoping to hold some sort of fundraising event at the end of our American leg in New York to benefit our US charities.

From there it is off to Leg 3 of the tour..... Europe!

Leg 1: Australia

2720km

   3 States

1 Territory

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The Australian leg is the first and a very important leg to us, it is where we live and grew up, we both have, and have had numerous friends and family members that have been effected by both Cancer and Parkinson's diseases and hope to do all that we can to support our local charities, Cure Cancer Australia and Parkinson's NSW along the way.

During this leg of our journey we plan to visit a couple of key locations. Locations close to us and which hold meaning.

The tour will be kicked off in Ballarat the home of Jason but more importantly his father David, a sufferer of Parkinson's and the seed that started the idea of this trip.

During the first day of the tour we will be joined on the road by a number of friends and supporters who will ride the 100km route from Ballarat to Geelong to see us off on our journey. While in Geelong we intend to catch up with our bicycle sponsor Baum Cycles who are based there.

We then head south to catch the ferry to the Mornigton Peninsula and on through Gippsland in south east Victoria before we turn up into NSW via the coast and a few hills (hmmmmm…. Hills). Along the way we deviate away from the coastal roads and head inland towards Cootumundra, the home of Garry's late grand mother who battled with cancer for many years without ever giving up. They say the will is stronger than the body. Garry's grandmother proved this day in day out. She will be missed.

After Coota, its back towards the coast and onto Sydney, the home of Garry and a party celebrating that we actually survived the journey so far, before loading the bikes up once more and making our way upwards again. Destination, Brisbane.


Bellow is our new map for leg 1 of our tour, our home leg in Australia.

Through out this leg the plan is to drop into as many schools and support groups as physically possible. This way we can give encouragement to those that are fighting their own battles with these diseases while also providing awareness to all those that have yet to, and we hope never have to, experience what these diseases can do to individuals and families.

Leg one will take us through 3 states and 1 territory in 31days covering a total of 2720km, but this is only the beginning of our journey, next stop or should I say start.... Vancouver Canada and Leg 2 of the tour across the USA.

So that’s it for now. Till next time.

Where have we been...

Bit of a slow month for us update wise but only because there was a heap of good quality bike racing on with the "Tour de France" and it's thrills and spills, the Mountain Bike World Cup and finally the BMX World Champs. Out of all that the Aussies did, I would say, well. Cadel Evans got his first Tour victory (the first Australian to win it) and our Junior Women now have a BMX world champ. Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi, Oi, Oi.... After all that excitement we plain and simply were exhausted, but as the saying goes, it's time to get back in the saddle.

What's been happening ...... Hmmmmm. Well Jason's been using his graphical skills and tinkering away with the tour maps trying as always to find the best way across each country (including staying away from bears and mountain lions). At one stage I believe his mapping pen slipped because I'm sure we weren't heading to Brisbane, Australia, but then I was informed that it wasn't a mistake and yes we were going to the Sunshine state.

We've also been looking at some new phones and mobile devices which we will be taking with us. The idea was to try and use mobiles to update you all on what we are up to, including posting pics and vids. At the moment we are 75% certain the Samsung Galaxy S2 will do everything we need but we are holding off a little to check out some of the other competition. If you have any opinions on these or other phones let us know especially some of our international friends. We would love to know how they go in the US and EU.

It's "Good News Week"....

What a week we've just had. A week full of fantastic news from our existing sponsors and from two new sponsors we've been chasing for the last couple of months.

The week started with Garry making the trip down to Ballarat from Sydney on Sunday night.  We had an important meeting early the next morning with a potential new sponsor and thought it best that we both be there to show our pretty faces.

Up early the next morning, hopefully prepared, after spending the last few nights going over some items we wanted to discuss and a few strategies if things did or didn't go the way we wanted (thanks Skype), we headed off. At first things didn’t quite go to plan. The person we had to meet called in sick and our morning meeting had to be re scheduled to the next day at the last minute. Not a major issue, just a minor hiccup more than anything but it just meant we could head to our next meeting a little earlier, a chat with the guys (and girl) at custom bike builder, Baum Cycles down the road at Geelong.

Having, until recently, worked full time for Baum, it’s always good to get down to Geelong and catch up with Darren, Jodie, Dave, Nick and see what interesting colour schemes Jared has come up with in the paint shop. I was also keen to show Garry around so he could get an idea of the process we would be going through to get our custom frames.

We spent the afternoon working out requirements and specs for the bikes and this is what we came up with so far:

A Baum Wills (Titanium) 29er touring frame and a Baum Burke (Steel) 29er touring frame.

The Fit Bike.

These will be fitted with:
-Salsa Fargo touring forks,
-Salsa Woodchipper handlebars,
-Thomson Stems and posts,
-Brooks B17 Saddles,
  and a full set of SRAM Components.

The process for getting a custom bike  can be quite a long one but in the end will be more than worth the wait as these beasts will be more suited to the two of us and our own person styles (although Garry is still trying to work out what that style is). We will be posting a series of write ups about the process from concept and bike fit through to the finished product over the course of the year as we lead up to the tour.

To take a look at what Baum do you can visit their site at www.baumcycles.com

After a massive day with ups and downs it was time to send Garry back to Sydney but not before handing over a few presents which I'm sure you've all seen the photo of. I've been told he's got some plans for the sleeping bag which normal people wouldn't normally do so keep an eye out for that.

Everything just got better the following day with our rescheduled meeting, a teleconference with Bill from Telstra Country Wide. It took some time for word to get to Bill but he showed great interest in what we were doing and wanted to achieve. His excitement for the tour was infectious. We couldn't ask for more really. Not only did he agree to the items we were after but also offered help with PR and design for our new website. We will release some more details as we go.

Take a look at http://www.telstra.com.au/telstracountrywide/ to see some of the products Telstra have on offer.

We had also been talking to Rob from SRAM for a few months now regarding components for our bikes and later in the week we received word that we could announce them as the official component sponsor for The Long Road.

Sram will be fitting out our bikes with a mix of X9 and Apex components.

We will be posting further about SRAM in the near future, in the mean time check them out at http://www.sram.com/

Also check out SRAM’s own charity, World Bicycle Relief, http://www.worldbicyclerelief.org/

So that's about it. A massive week of good news. :-)

The Long Road Pre-Tour.

Over the last three to four months Garry and I have discussed our bike ride with many different people, we have had allot of fantastic feedback and interesting suggestions thrown our way, however one particular idea stood out to us as something we should seriously consider.
This was to split up our tour into a selection of shorter rides, or setting up additional lead-up rides to build up to the main event.

While both suggestions were good in their own way we did not want to split our tour up as this would defeat the purpose of what we are trying to achieve in the first place, so we decided to add an additional ride a few months prior to the main tour start date.

So what is the point of doing a lead-up ride rather than just jumping in head first to our main tour? Well there are a number of reasons behind our decision, first and foremost we believe it will be a great opportunity to further promote of our main tour and generate additional awareness for our two worthy causes.

Secondly was to get a better idea of where we are at in our preparations, providing us with valuable time in the saddle getting used to our new bikes which will both be custom made for us for the tour, as well as working out the best ways to manage our gear when we are fully loaded.


Adelaide to Melbourne.

We wanted a route that would lead-in to our main tour nicely without doubling up on destinations, riding toward our main tour start point seemed like a logical step. So Adelaide to Melbourne and in late January it was.

Of cause there was another reason for choosing Adelaide in January as our start point, The “Tour Down Under”. Being a bike racing fan I couldn’t help myself, we could go and watch the tour and then kick of our ride the day after the final stage, couldn’t think of a better way to start.

We have also been busy re-working our main tour route and in the coming weeks will be posting up a selection of new maps together with a blog about our reasons behind our destinations. For now here is an overall world map of the route.

We would like to announce Baum Cycles as the official bicycle frame supplier for The Long Road Tour.


Based in Geelong Australia, Baum Cycles are makers of some of the finest handcrafted titanium and steel bicycles in the world.


We will post up more details soon, but in the mean time head on over to the Baum Cycles web site at  http://www.baumcycles.com/ and check out their Flickr page at http://www.flickr.com/photos/baumcycles/

Quick Update

It's been some time now between posts and many of you must be wondering what's been happening now that it's early May.

After much thought and discussion, we have decided to postpone The Long Road Tour until April 2012. We are both disappointed that we have to wait a little longer before our Tour can begin but know that it is the best thing for us to do, for a few reasons.

Unfortunately earlier in the year Jason suffered sprained ligaments in his ankle, an injury which put restrictions on preparations and training for the task ahead, and the risk of further injury during the ride was far to high if it hadn't been left to heal properly.

Also the extra time allows us to get more businesses involved in supporting us and more time to raise extra money for our chosen charities. Putting a 10,000+ km ride together takes a large amount of preparation so with the extra time now available to us, we have decided make our tour bigger and better than originally planned, with some major changes in the works.

These include a slightly longer and modified tour route and itinerary that hope will help to reach a greater audience to which we can promote our worthy causes. Some exciting news regarding sponsorship: We have been in discussions with a major Australian business who is interested in sponsoring our journey, pushing the tour back to 2012 has enabled greater opportunities to obtain further support from this organisation. So really our disappointing decision has a silver lining. Unfortunately at this present time we are unable to publicly release many more details but stay tuned.

While we were at it we also decided to add a pre-tour ride to our new itinerary. A short tour from Adelaide to Melbourne here in Australia, which we have started to plan and aim for early 2012. The intention of this additional ride is to help promote the main ride and push the message further. It is also a fantastic opportunity for us to gauge where we are at with our preparation, as well as test the gear we will be using while on the main tour.

So to our followers and fans we would like to thank you for your support to date, don't lose heart, we are pushing ahead with our plans and hope to make the journey even better than what we originally thought.

Time to say goodbye

On the 2nd of April 2011, Melva Florence Derham, grandmother to Garry, lost her battle with cancer after a courages fight. A fight that went on for over 6 years and at one stage was looking to be won.

Below is a tribute by Garry for his Grandmother:

Melva (Nan), was born in 1924 at Murrumburrah, NSW and was the 4th child out of seven. In 1938, Nan and her family moved to Cootamundra after my Great Grandfather was transferred. It was here that Nan would remain for the rest of her life, working as a nurse during the war, meeting my grandfather Stan (pop) not long after war was declared, marrying, having 5 children, 11 grand children, and 16 great grand children (with one on the way to make it 17).

I don't have many memories of Nan and Pop before Pop passed away, as i was only very young, apart from Nan's "no non-sense" face, her voice and cooking snails out the front of the farm on the outskirts of Coota(mundra). That voice didn't change even after she sold the farm and moved into Coota. I commented to many people that even while she was sick and becoming frail, if you spoke to her on the phone you could hear the same voice. It was that voice that made me forget what she was going through and remember Nan as she was before. Sitting on the veranda out the back of Thompson St, Coota, knitting needles in hand, working on something. She always had her knitting needles. Even when her knuckles where riddled with arthritis, Nan's hands would still be a blur as she made a jumper for someone in record time. Introducing my young family to Nan and the relatives, and the family Christmas parties at one of my Uncles/Aunties place are also memories I will have with me forever.

As a lot of people would say, growing up during the World War period was tough and made you tough. Nan was no exception. She lived by herself (not alone, as Nan had many family and friends nearby) since she lost her mate in 1982, she travelled, mostly by herself, but more importantly she fought. Fought the disease that wanted nothing more than to stop her. I can still remember Nan a couple of months before she past away saying to me, as she did many others, "... they are going to find a cure for me". It was this spirit to fight, to never give up till the last breath that inspired the journey I'm going to take.

See ya Nan. Going to miss you lots. Say hello to Pop for me.

Parkinson's NSW

The Charites Part 2.

WHO WE ARE:

We work in partnership with a network of support groups throughout the State.

We encourage research into Parkinson’s disease and co-operate with those undertaking it.

We advocate on behalf of the Parkinson’s community and strive to increase community awareness of the disease.

We look towards taking a leadership role in representing the Parkinson’s community in New South Wales and Australia-wide.

OUR VISION: A community free of Parkinson’s disease.

OUR MISSION: To enhance the quality of life to all people living with Parkinson’s disease.


PARKINSON’S DISEASE IN BRIEF:

• A chronic progressive, incurable, complex, disabling neurological condition.
• The four key symptoms are tremor, rigidity, akinesia/ bradykinesia and postural instability, with many secondary symptoms.
• Over 80,000 Australian’s have been diagnosed with Parkinson ’s disease.
• 10% of those diagnosed will be under the age of 40.
• Parkinson’s disease is more prevalent than prostate, ovarian or cervical cancer or leukemia
• 1 in 5 people with Parkinson’s disease are working age (15-64)
• Prevalence increasing at around 2-3% pa

To donate, visit "The Long Road" donation page or email us at donate@thelongroadtour.com

For more information about Parkinson’s disease and the support services offered by Parkinson’s NSW, ring toll-free 1800 644 189 or visit http://www.parkinsonsnsw.org.au/