ROAM rain

That's not a biggie for a velonaut, you would say, but I am sleeping in my hammock without the rainfly. Stupid me! Double stupid because I trusted the weather forecast and not the visual information I got from occasional lightning.
So I wake up with a shock because I hear or sense raindrops falling. I squirm out of my sleeping bag and out the slit in the hammock. Grasp the drying clothes from the ridgeline of the hammock. Take da Hood off the Mango (at least I HAD closed that). Turn the Mango towards the hammock and turn on the light. Pull out my backpack and get the rainfly out and drape it over the hammock. Now I'm safe for the moment. (I am SO lucky that it only rains lightly so far) I find my raincoat and now can work in a bit of comfort. Working steadily now instead of frantically, I attach the rainfly and organize my stuff a bit. Before I can get back to sleep, I must report this of course by means of my blog. The rain drop, drip, drops playfully on the rainfly and I'm cosy again. It's 1.40 PM, I bid you goodnight.

PS: the photo is shot at another campsite as I look up to one of the trees I am supported by. You can see the thin but very strong ridgeline of the hammock and the mosquito netting.

ROAM, Billings to Miles City Fitnessdata

Billings to Miles City

Interestingly a higher output this day, although we mostly descended.

Some photos and a little film about the ride of 6th of August to Miles city

shirt and seat. notice any similarities?

shirt with salt marks from sweating in the pattern of the seat

The bumper of Volker's Dodge, covered with squashed grasshoppers

Friday,  5th of August, 9th day of ROAM.

The last two days were pretty easy with mostly descending. Of course the days before were mostly climbing and they were no short rides either. Apart from the fact that there was simply no time to keep the blog, the Internet is non-existent too. No wifi on the campgrounds and 3G from T-mobile is failing at the moment. I can be called BTW on my USA SIM, when you have my number.

We are now in Billings and Internet is sometimes very good and then all of the sudden it's gone, so I'm writing off-line now and hopefully I get it online.

Anyway, the landscape is just beautiful along creeks and rivers,  mountains and farmland. The fauna is someting else here, deer and moose in the city, rabbits. I nooticed a prairiedog right along the street, looking out it's hole in the ground. I jokingly said to Jim Snyder from RideSouth: "it's Groundhog Day". He immediately understood what I meant. The scenery may change a lot, but our routine is basically the same every day: we break up camp, eat Breakfast that we bought the day before, start riding a long stretch to the coffeestop, where we eat and have our first coffee, we ride on to the lunch-stop and get a copious meal and ride on to the campground and find some restaurant to have another huge meal.  Before or after we set up camp and get a hot shower. I wash my clothes under the shower. I have only one short bikepants and it's mostly time not completely dry in the morning. It simply dries on my body while I ride. The cooling effect is welcome, even in the early morning. 

This all is not to say that I get bored. On the contrary: I feel either exstatatic or immensely tired. Either way I do not get bored, Ugh.

Just before the Kims' Marina (Helena) I was very, very weak. I have a powermeter in my Mango Tour and while I typically output 145Watts on average throughout the day, I had only 50Watts to give on the last short, but steep uphills. The ride had been long, with much climbing to do and I had had not enough electrolytes. Maybe it would not have mattered much, since ALL riders were beat.

tiredness

Very impressing is the sky of Montana. The clouds are very high and from the passes you can look very far. I'm getting dialed in with the heat. It was not extremely hot this Friday, but nevertheless I could see a huge thunderstorm above our destination (Billings KOA campground).

Big Sky Montana

I took it very easy to give the storm time to pass ;-) and that seemed to work. In fact I took it easy because I know that dealing with a thunderstorm can be exhausting when you need to improvise, find shelter and sit out the storm. Outrunning a storm never works. You just get exhausted and when you need the energy, you're out of it. Most riders made it to the campground in time before the thunderstorm to burst, but David Egglestone got caught in the middle. He was picked up by a SAG vehicle, but before they could reach him, he got pretty cold and tired. He had to deal with hail stones, just like Bram a few days earlier. Bram was brought to the campgorund by a friendly car-park owner. That's something else eh?

When the storm began at the campground I was just setting up my Hennessy hammock. I was just putting on the rainfly when the wind picked up, flapping the unfastened rainfly around, and i I felt some drops. I knew what to do, get the rainfly off , throw it in my Mango, close the Mango and run with my stuff to the nearest sheltering place, which happened to be the Barbeque spot from the campground. After studying the fierce thunder for a while, during which a huge branch was ripped from a tree, I decided to take a shower. When I got out, the sun was already shining again and I could finish setting myself up. No time lost, HA! I treasure every moment of this wonderful trip. This blog is not only for my readers, but not in the last place for myself as a sort of diary. 

Likewise, I started to talk into my camera. Vlogging, so to speak. I talk about what comes to mind, it can be about the environment, a piece of my equipment or anything else concerning ROAM. I hope to be able to upload at least a bit of these Vlogs on my YouTube account (twilwel), but that can only be done on rest days. Sunday will be a rest day and I'll do my best to keep you posted. 

T minus one. ROAM takes off tomorrow!

What a great event. Now already!
At the moment that I joined the list of ROAM riders (I was so eager that I am the second person on the list, right after Josef, our captain, himself) I could not have dreamt that it would become such a fun event. The riders come from Holland, Germany, Denmark, England, North-Amerika, Canada and probably several other countries. They all have their own accents but we all speak one common language, We Love Velomobiles. We love it so much that we put up with a gaziljon questions literally every moment we stop. We often have conversations at traffic lights from people hanging out of their carwindows, pedestrians forgetting to cross the street and cyclists that almost fall of their bike, eventhough they have a foot on the ground, waiting as we are for the light to go green. We are determined to leave no question unanswered though I must admit that when the green light comes quickly, my answers are accordingly shorter.

It probably makes a big difference that we started in Portland, since this really is a very bike-minded city. You can see a lot of people clearly being alternative to such an extent that it becomes normal: this is Portland. Biking is an enormous culture here and that's a great difference with the country I come from. In the Netherlands, cycling is so accepted as a transportation tool that we think nothing of it. It is different in Portland, cyclists are clearly proud of their cycles and this is reflected in their bikeshops and pubs. For me as a Dutchman it is amazing to see that there are special pubs for cyclists. And a LOT of them. We wouldn't dream of calling a pub a bike-pub. Commuters, racers, weekend warriors, bike-messengers and utility cyclist alike come together in the evening in these pubs, put their bikes behind it and enjoy a beer and an extensive meal.

Cycling may be a bit too normal in Holland. But what is too normal? I mean, in Holland elderly people keep cycling and this is exactly what I miss in Portland. People who are a bit timid or not confident that they can join in traffic will soon stop cycling here: you need to be a bit of a warrior. The reason is quite obvious, there are almost no cyclepaths, so cyclists must find their way between the cars. Now I must say that traffic here is VERY friendly. Unfortunately cars are very big and massively overpowered here, so they look very intimidating.

We velomobilists have been finding our way through Portland these days very well. We are kind of used to using the streets, because we can sort of keep up with the flow of traffic. The enormous amount of crossings without clear priority and all the traffic lights were sometimes annoying. We had to do a lot of slowing down and accelerating again on Vancouver street. The Interstate is crowded with cars but was easier to keep going at speed. Of course Myrtle the Turtle (that's an electro-assiste bike BTW) was always there with us to show us around town. Thank you Sylvia, you made our rides a whole lot easier.

Well enough for now, better go to sleep, because tomorrow is the big DAY. Send-off at the Fountain at 12 o' clock Downtown. The start of ROAM. Keep track of us......

Sweat and pain: comfort in the velomobile.

 For ROAM comfort will be very important, Daytrips of 200-300km a day for several weeks in a row is not only exhausting, it can easily cause very annoying pain in joints or a rash because of sweating so much. I'm almost completely comfortable in my Mango, even on long rides, except..... my upper left arm developes a very annoying ghost pain that comes and goes as it pleases. That's why I made elbow pads in the sides of my ROAMango (yes, I am building a special Mango for ROAM). I first tested it in my current Mango Sport and was so happy with the result that I made it in ROAMango as well.

Another comfort aspect is heat. The Mango is not so hot as one might expect, because most of your body is in the shade, there is an airflow coming through the footholes and it is easy to maintain a good speed with a relatively low effort. Still, the deserts in the Mid-West of the USA can be very hot in the daytime and it may become awkward to cycle. As it happens we have customers all over the world riding our Mangos' and they sometimes have surprising strategies to counter extreme weather conditions. One of them is an Australian doctor that rides a Mango Sport Red Editon. BTW: he's made a very nice clip, showing all the features of his favourite ride.
It can become very hot Down Under and Paul uses a Flevobike roof during the hottest hours of the day, because he is in the shade that way. What's good enough for an Aussie, is good enough for me, but.... I think that this roof is much higher than needed and the attachment to the body is not how I'd like to have it. Well there are more Mango riders who feel that way and one of them, Reinhard Fritz, has found a nice solution that he posted on the German Velomobil forum. I made my own version and the result is on the photo above. A more detailed photoserie and annotations how I made it is on Picasa. It was quite a lot of extra work, it usually is when you make something the first time, but I think it will be worth while.