May 19, 2001 - Mike and Marilyn's 2001 TranAmerican Bike Tour

Virginia Beach, Virginia.

Bicycles, planes, and automobiles.

Whew! We made it to the east coast, and so did our bikes, intact. Today has been a long travel day, starting at one end of the country and ending on the other. On one of our plane take offs, I watched a bicyclist riding along a bike path far below become an insignificant speck and thought about how we would soon be specks ourselves inching across the magnitude of the continent.

Despite our attempts to control it, our stress levels had been creeping up in the last few weeks. Mike was trying to juggle his full time job, take a class at the college, and finish it 3 weeks early in order to leave on this trip. Marilyn got a last minute hair cut that was so bad, she decided to go for a second reparative haircut the next day (elsewhere) and it is still too short!

The stressor today was not so much the crowded planes or freeway traffic, but worry about how our bikes had fared when we picked up the smashed and torn boxes at baggage claim. Fortunately Mike just reassembled the bikes and found all is well. Our little laptop is also checking out like a champ for its first web site posting via the data port in our room, so we are taking a huge sigh of relief! In the morning, we'll be ready to get this show on the road and actually start biking.