We Made It!

We made it to Portland, Maine, today and thereby completed the transcontinental bicycle ride! I rode to the Portland Head Light (lighthouse) and Lailla was waiting for me there. We took a few photos on the beach and then a couple at the lighthouse as well. That's a wrap!

 

I started in Fryeburg, Maine, near the border with New Hampshire this morning. The first few miles of the ride was on the Maine Mountain Division Trail. I started without my windbreaker on, but stopped after just 1.55 miles to put it on because it was quite chilly. Somehow, I paused Strava while messing with my phone at that stop. I didn't realize that it wasn't recording my ride until I was nearly 20 miles into the day's ride. I've been so careful every day to make sure Strava was accurately recording each day's ride and I messed up the final day. Using Google Maps and matching it up with my Strava map, I determined that I had missed recording 18 miles of my ride. Doh! So today's total with the missing 18 miles added back in was 55.25 miles.

The only other pictures I took today were of another portion of the Maine Mountain Division Trail. It was not a very consistent trail, from gravel road with fairly large cobbles sticking out of the trail surface, to paved trail (very narrow to normal trail width), to sandy singletrack.

 

As you can see, it was another beautiful day for a bike ride. I have been very lucky with the weather on this adventure. I had a couple days of very light rain--really just mist--in Montana and a couple days of very light rain in Wisconsin. There were some other "near miss" days where a rainstorm had moved through ahead of me and I only had to contend with wet roads. I also have had a couple days of significant headwinds. That's it in 50 days of riding across the continent. Quite amazing actually.

The grand total of biking miles for this trip is 3737.8 miles. Lailla logged 7415 miles in the Subaru, almost exactly double my biking miles. That does not include the miles driven from our home in Colorado to Anacortes, Washington, nor the miles we'll drive to get back to Colorado.

Now it's time for some rest. We'll stay here in Portland for a few days to visit friends and repack the car for the drive back to Colorado. For the drive home, we're probably going to meander a little bit and take a somewhat leisurely pace.

Again, stay tuned for a few more posts to this blog over the next few days. There's more to come!