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. :-)