First multi-day, multi-state ride of the season

The 3rd annual “meet and eat” is scheduled for this Sunday at noon. It’s again being held in Clearfield, Pennsylvania at the world famous Denny’s Beer Barrel Pub.

My friends and I have ridden out to lunch at Denny’s for the past two years in a row. This year 8 of my friends have committed to the PA ride, but 2 had to drop out at he last minute. So now it’s just 6 of us going.

Mike and I, and two of my friends Rick and Alex, we are doing the “long” version this year. We’re leaving Friday morning and planning on getting back home Monday night. My two other friends Jay and Dan are leaving Friday after work and planning on getting back home Sunday night. We all hope to cross paths in route, if not we’ll see each other at the motel in Clearfield.

So for the past few days I’ve been working on the route for my group and Jay has been working on his route. And at the last minute we exchanged routes in the hopes of somehow running in to one other on the road since my group was taking the long way there and Jay’s route was a bit shorter, and towards the end we were planning on riding the same roads up to Clearfield.

Since there are a few of us going on this ride, I also wanted for everyone to have my route. Initially I e-mailed my Microsoft Streets and Trips file to the gang, but my version of the software was newer and the others could not open it.

Alex doesn’t have the software anyway and doesn’t have a GPS so he needed the route in the form of ‘directions’. So I went and typed up the directions for the entire trip and e-mailed those to the group.

The directions would be used as a road by road reference. Later in the evening Mike went ahead and created a Garmin file to be used by both of our GPS units, he also e-mailed the file to Rick who also uses a Garmin, but it was late already and I pretty much figured that Rick was already asleep. I was hoping that he either created his own Garmin file with my route or would load ours in the morning.

This is the earliest I’ve ever done a multi-state ride, we’ve been checking the weather and everyday the forecast is changing. There is a lot of rain moving from the west to the east and it looks like we might be getting wet 3 of the 4 days.

Another late night of packing and getting ready for the trip, another early start ....tomorrow we ride!